No Right Way To Do A Wrong Thing

The state of Oklahoma tried and failed to kill death row inmate Clayton Lockett last night, and then he died anyway.  Ten minutes into the lethal injection, when Lockett was supposedly unconscious, he began writhing and struggling and gasping and gagging.  The executioners decided to stop the infusion ten minutes later, when it was fairly clear that Lockett wasn’t dead. What happened next isn’t completely clear.  On MSNBC last night, Rachel Maddow reported that, in what can only be described as an irony of Shakespearean proportions, Lockett was being transported to a hospital when he died of a heart attack about 43 minutes after the first drug had been administered.  According to today’s reports, Lockett died in the execution chamber.  Whether anyone tried to resuscitate him or offer other medical attention between the time the infusion was halted and he ultimately perished has not been revealed.  What has been reported is that the cause of the execution procedure failure was a blown vein at the injection site.

As a guy who’s started tens of thousands of IV’s over forty years of practice, I can tell you that this happens all the time, and that’s in cooperative patients who have no objection to being stuck in the first place, a situation that’s unlikely in the case of a condemned prisoner.  It’s why it was always protocol in my department for a tech to watch the injection site for the first twenty or thirty seconds during power injections for CT scans, and for her to immediately hit the “abort” button if , IV infiltrated. It’s hardly surprising that the same thing happens not infrequently in the case of condemned prisoners.

It’s getting harder and harder for states to kill prisoners in the US, and make no mistake about it, that’s what they are doing…they are killing prisoners.  In the past, this has been done in all kinds of supposedley quick and relatively painless ways (unless you happen to be the one being killed, in which case that whole “relatively” modifier carries some real weight).  They’ve used hanging, which works nearly instantaneously if the hangman’s noose successfully breaks the cervical spine, causing a so-called “hangman’s fracture”, but can take several minutes if the fracture fails to occur and the victim dies by slow strangulation.  Firing squads have been rarely employed, but are reasonably effective, just so long as no one misses, although the results are somewhat messier than in other methods.  Early in the twentieth century, someone came up with the bright idea of taking Edison’s invention to the next level and using electrocution as a means of execution, perhaps believing that this method would be less barbaric than hanging.  Anyone who’s ever inadvertently touched a hot wire while attempting an electrical repair can testify that electrocution is anything but painless.

So in the latter half of the twentieth century, in an effort to comply with the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment”, many states switched to death by lethal injection.  A sequential three-drug cocktail is typically used, first a drug to induce unconsciousness, then a drug to paralyze the muscles including the breathing muscles, and then potassium chloride to stop the heart.  For years, the first drug administered was sodium thiopental, a barbiturate routinely used to induce general anesthesia, and which, if used in sufficient dosage, inhibits the respiratory center of the brain to the point where the patient ceases breathing and simply dies.  But the European manufacturers of the drug began to refuse to supply it to American officials on the moral grounds of objecting to its use as a state-sanctioned murder weapon.  American executioners have had to scramble for a new sedative, and in Lockett’s case, they were trying Versed.  Versed is the same medication that those of you in my demographic have received while lying on your left side with gastroenterologist holding a four-foot black snake standing behind you.  It’s used for conscious sedation, which basically means that in controlled doses, the patient is sedated, but still awake.  In larger doses it causes complete unconsciousness and even death from respiratory arrest…just so long as it actually goes in the vein.

The point of all this is the whole oxymoronic concept of kind and painless execution.  There is simply no way to put lipstick on this pig.  Execution is by its very nature a cruel and unusual and painful process, whether it’s by drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, or the controlled infusion of deadly drugs.  If Americans want to continue in their biblical adherence to “an eye for an eye” and the glorification of revenge as a social remedy, they ought to stop pretending that execution is something that it is not.  Go back to the days of public hangings and laugh with your children as the victim twitches and expels his bowels at the end of a rope.  Or do the civilized thing and stop this nonsense altogether.  American prisons already hold a population larger than some European countries.  Keeping a few hundred more bodies in there for life will hardly make a dent.

BW

 

The Art Of The Faux Pas

If there’s one thing at which I excel, it’s finding new and inventive ways to firmly lodge one or the other foot in my perpetually open mouth.  And in almost every instance, it turns out that I should have known better.  This morning, after a brisk 45 minutes on the recumbent bike at the Y, in which I am reasonably certain I burned through enough calories to vaporize a seven course meal, I decided to reward myself at Barnes and Noble with something satisfyingly saturated with large amounts of fat and sugar (while balancing it out with a guilt-free bottled water).  So I ambled to the counter and ordered a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup cookie and a Fiji water, and presented my B&N member card for my 10% discount, and figured that I had covered all my bases…but in 2014 service industry, there’s always one more question. Someone always wants your email or to know if you’d like that wet or dry or with soy milk or if you’d also like to donate to MD or MS or PMS or whatever, and today was no exception:

Barista: Would you like that cookie warmed up?

Me: No thank you.

Barista: For here or to go?

Me: Here.

Barista: Do you want a fork with your cookie?

Me: No.  It’s a cookie.  Who eats cookies with a fork?

Barista: Well, if they’re soft, I do…and I don’t judge.

Which completely cut off my planned riff on how people who eat chicken drumsticks or spareribs with a fork and knife are clearly anti-American pinko terrorists of some kind and should be immediately considered for a internment camp in the Arizona desert.  Hey, I know when to shut up and cut my losses.

BW

Nothing Wrong With A Quickie Every Now And Then

I’d spend more time today blogging, but I’m due at my dentist in about an hour for two fillings, one crown, and a bite block he wants to build for about four hundred bucks, but which I’m going to decline, since the fillings and crown alone are going to run in the neighborhood of a Porsche payment.  I know a lot of people have Xanax-requiring anxiety attacks when anticipating a dental engagement, but it’s never bothered me a bit.  I’ve been known to drift off to the gentle thrumming of the high-speed drill and the calming burble of the suction device.  I’ve never been a guy who’s frightened by syringes of Xylocaine capped by long sharp needles.  It’s the snap of latex gloves ensheathing index fingers the size of sewer pipes that sends me into a panic attack…but that’s a different appointment for a different day.

Meanwhile, I wanted to add a couple of postscripts to yesterday’s piece. Oprah had a brilliant tweet, remarking that Donald Sterling seems to have a “plantation mentality” in the 21st century.  But as always, no one nails it like Jon Stewart and the writers of the “Daily Show”.  Noting the obvious facts that Sterling makes some of his millions off the sweat and talent of several large black men and that he shares his bed with a beautiful multiracial woman (the same one he told to not bring black people to his games), they summarized the situation with the best line of 2014 so far:  “It’s that age-old story, ‘Yeah, I’m racist, but my dick and my wallet are not.'”

More wit and wisdom tomorrow.

BW

 

The Conservative Refrain: “This Isn’t What It Looks Like”

Umm…Yes it is.  There is a frightening streak of hatefulness that runs through the Right.  They like to portray themselves as patriots and pragmatists, but when you scratch just a millimeter below the surface, you’re often confronted with a pustulant ooze of racism, bigotry, misogyny, and often outright inhumanity.  And what’s more worrisome than the disease itself is the fact that the icons of the Right revel in their own pathology.  They’re proud of their own ugliness, throwing it proudly in our faces at every opportunity.  Take the darling of the Tea Baggers, Sarah Palin.  She was one of big draws at this weekend’s NRA conclave in Indianapolis (it’s going to take a lot of beer and nachos and Colt’s cheerleaders in their skimpiest outfits to ever scour that stink out of Lucas Oil Stadium).  Here was her hawkish battle cry which was cheered by the sycophantic throngs of gun loving “patriots”:  “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists.”  Really?  What Sarah Palin and her ilk stand for is torture?  What they celebrate most is one of the saddest chapters in US history?  Again, it’s not the Sarah Palins and Rick Santorums and Lindsey Grahams who terrify me most, it’s the millions of Americans nodding their heads and waving their flags and strapping on their Glocks and applauding these weasels for their appalling stances on everything from abortion to immigration to foreign policy…the idea that our problem is that we’re not violent enough, that we’re not stingy enough with our poor, that what we need isn’t affirmative action, but a return to an “every man for himself” and good luck with that.  I mean, Sarah fucking Palin says let’s torture us some A-Rabs and she get’s a standing O?  That’s nauseating.

But the biggest story of the weekend is the verbal diarrhea spewing from the mouth of yet another conservative billionaire.  LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling is recorded telling his girlfriend, who looks fabulously stunningly multiracial, to stop bringing black people to his basketball games and stop appearing with them on Instagram, and in general, to stop being so…you know…Negro.  And what’s his only response so far?  Well, pretty much the only one he can come up with, other than the truth, which is unthinkable for most of these pricks.  He says, through his representatives, that this isn’t what it looks like, that the recording of his voice isn’t actually a recording of him.  Which is only going to make him look worse when it’s inevitably confirmed that he did say, in fact, exactly what he’s purported to have said…and probably said much worse in conversations that weren’t recorded.  Listen, you know you’ve well and truly stepped on your own dick when statements you make as a private citizen draw a public response from the President of the United States.  Obama’s response was perfect:  “When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don’t really have to do anything, you just let them talk.”

That worked pretty well for the Aryan corps over at FOX, who lionized Nevada rancher Clive Bundy as he was basically defying the law and the federal government and threatening armed insurrection.  When Bundy exposed what anyone with half a brain could see coming, that he wasn’t just another typical batshit right-wing Teabag militia wingnut, but was a typical right-wing racist to boot, the pundits at FOX had to backpeddle faster than a bunch of Little 500 cyclists in a pile-up.  For a delightful summary of this bit of hilarious hypocrisy, give Bill Maher five minutes to enlighten you.

And speaking of hypocrisy and narrowly disguised racism at FOX, does anyone doubt for a moment that Bill O’Reilly’s bug up his ass over Beyonce has a racial basis?  Would O’Reilly be even half as irate if Time had put Katy Perry or Britney Spears or Madonna or Lady Gaga on their cover?  Would he bemoan their inappropriateness as role models?  But let’s face it…he thinks Beyonce and Jay-Z are just a little…well…uppity.

The right-wing conservative Republican refrain is “This isn’t what it appears to be”.  Yes, it is.

BW

 

Dicks In The News, Celebrities Behaving Badly (No Pics), And Me Whining For A Change

Here’s the good thing about limited readership: it’s liberating.  I mean…if no one’s paying attention, who am I going to offend?  (Whoever it is, would you please at least make a comment?)  Just before I took a week off from blogging, there were 142 page views on April 15, and yesterday I scored a grand total of…wait for it…11.  I’m thinking of making this a once-a-year publication and limiting it to Tax Day.  I guess in a head-to-head showdown with a 1040 form, I’ve at least got a fighting chance.  Ok, that concludes the whining portion of today’s submission.

Those of you who checked in yesterday, all dozen minus one of you (ok, sorry…I’m really done whining now), will have noted my discussion of my ex-blogmate’s proclivity toward profanity, and it got me to thinking.  Cory is way more prolific than I am, and I think I may have figured out at least one reason for his productivity.  He’s just more pissed off than I am.  I do my best writing when I’m in full rant mode (or when I’m mired in sloppy sentimentality, which might be more poetic, but isn’t nearly as entertaining), so I’ve scoured the blogosphere and web for general instances of heinous douchebaggery and foul fuckheadedness, and as you might imagine, there was no lack of either.

First, let’s talk about my new hero (or is it heroine? or is that condescending and insensitive? whatever), Joan Rivers.  I’ve loved this woman for as long as I can remember, and I love her more than ever now.  Joan says what’s on her mind, is poetically profane, insanely hilarious,  and knows no boundaries, age included.  Joan has yet again offended the political correctness police with a quick throwaway one-liner delivered on the April 22 “Today Show”.  Rivers is like manure these days, showing up on every available talk show to hype her new show on the WE network, “Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best“.  On the Today Show she compared her accommodations at her daughter’s house thusly:  “those women in the basement in Cleveland had more space”.  Well, the manufactured outrage machine went into overdrive and various protectors of the public good DEMANDED that Joan apologize, but she impolitely refused.  Her response is perfect:  “There is nothing to apologize for. I made a joke. That’s what I do. Calm down. Calm fucking down. I’m a comedienne. They’re free, so let’s move on.”  I’m with Joan 100% on this.  It was a joke.  It was funny.  She said it and she owned it and enough with the fucking apologies already.

Get a little perspective.  If you want to be outraged about something, let’s try the governor and legislature of Georgia or these militia kooks in Nevada.  Down there in the Peachtree State, they signed a new law that basically says it’s legal to take a gun anywhere.  You can be packing in church, at the park, in school, in the airport lobby, or at your favorite local pub.  The theory here, backed by the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers at the NRA, is that the general public will be safer if, when someone starts shooting in one of these place, ten or twelve patriotic citizens start shooting back.  Yep, Berettas in bars and Glocks in groceries…nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan.  Oh, and by the way, just to give you an added sense of security, there’s no need to worry, the Georgia law is pretty much already in place right here in Indiana, so feel free to strap your Colt to your hip and head over to Kilroys for the Little 500 festivities, and don’t forget…to “drink responsibly”.

And how about this maniac rancher in Nevada, who up until yesterday was the veritable darling of the Right Wing and FOX News because he and his militia buddies stood up to the evil federal government which was trying to you know…enforce the law.  Once Clive Bundy got his platform and the backing of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Rush and the rest, he figured he could now expound on the real problems plaguing our great nation:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Oh, how the Right hates it when one of its stars inadvertently shows the rest of us what’s behind the curtain.  That hot high-pressure surging column of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and chauvinism that is the lifeblood of the GOP.  That is something about which to be outraged.

The damned parking meters downtown are another rage-inducing feature, but since mine is about to run out, that’s enough for today.

BW

Earth Restored To Original Axis: I’m Back

It’s been a long week.  Mrs. Left and I spent a four day weekend in Chicago.

We always look forward with great anticipation to our Chicago homecomings (we both attended Northwestern, and she grew up in Skokie), which typically lasts about as long as it takes to appreciate the skyline as we’re cruising up the Dan Ryan with Chicago drivers doing a high-speed criss-cross ballet of impending mortality in all six lanes on both sides of the median.  By the time we’ve transferred our car to the valet for stacking in its $60 a day weekend garage, schlepped enough luggage for a two-week transoceanic voyage up to our room, and slipped into some sensible walking shoes for our initial venture onto Michigan Avenue, we’re wondering just what the hell we were looking forward to in the first place.  By the time we actually hit the sidewalk , with Saks on one corner and Nordstrom on the other, listen to the sirens of the constant ambulances heading in and out of Northwestern Memorial’s trauma center, get a good whiff of the exhaust of several million cars and buses, and use all the skills we’ve learned in fourteen years on the dance floor to avoid the virtual sea of humanity threatening our personal space from every vector, we’re already dreaming of a rapid return to our safe warm cozy little home in flyover country, where our idea of urban blight is complaining that we had to wait through two light cycles at College Mall and Third at lunch hour.

Then the first half of this week found me planted in what must be the ergonomically worst designed chair available at Furniture From Hell from 8 to 5 each day, learning fascinating details about Indiana real estate license law, zoning, variances, contracts, easements, encroachments, and all the ways I can be punished if I happen to sell you a house that I somehow forgot to mention was sited on a nuclear fuel dump…but that’s another story for another day.

Chicago was actually entertaining.  Once we waded through all those crowds, got honked at by a dozen taxi drivers (all of whom seem to be refugees from Kabul), and endured the jostling by battalions of Chicagoans who seemed to have somewhere to go, except for the ones ahead of us on the sidewalk, who were uniformly SMFA’s (Slow Moving Fat Asses), we got some shopping in, helped the Illinois economy, and had some quality time with friends and family.

That handsome fellow in the pic above is none other than Cory Franklin, my erstwhile blogmate from “Left, Right, and Centered” and roommate from our days in six-year-med at Northwestern back in that distant era before AOL, blogs, cell phones, and Justin Bieber…hard to remember there ever was such an innocent time.  Cory and I met at a Starbucks on Skokie Boulevard, just south of the Edens Expressway.  Cory had forewarned me that he was a local celebrity at this particular caffeine dispensary, but I really had no idea.  Think Norm on “Cheers”:  “Norm, how’s the world been treating you?”  “Like a baby treats a diaper.  Pour me a beer.”  Only with coffee.  In the course of ninety minutes, I met the store’s owner, all the baristas, and a guy who heard us talking and invited us to his off-off-off-Broadway play.  It was an experience.

Couple of things I noticed.  First off, Cory towers over me by a good six inches.  I never noticed that when we were both in our twenties.  Maybe that’s because Cory slouched a lot, or maybe it’s because he just recently entered puberty and hit a growth spurt.  And let me tell you about the hats.  Mine is more of an affectation, but also keeps all those dangerous basal cell-inducing UV rays off my pasty white countenance.  With Cory, it may have something to do with a little male pattern baldness.  Back in the days when he had a lush head of dark hair, it was perpetually covered by a navy blue watch cap, winter and summer, to the point where I nicknamed him “Cheech” (for Cheech Wizard, a character featured in my second favorite publication at the time after Penthouse, National Lampoon).  That nickname never stuck, although his for me, “O.W.” (for Oliver Wendell Holmes) carried right through my residency, after which I was “Bullet Ben” for a time (don’t ask).

One other thing stood out.  Cory employs the universal adjective to such an extent he makes me look like a Baptist preacher at a Sunday picnic.  For a guy who in print wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, in person peppers every fucking sentence with half a dozen fucking expletives…and Cory’s a guy whose writing is comparable to George Will’s, in that I’m forced to Google some obscure four syllable French or Latin inspired metaphorical reference at least once in each essay…and he’s got a raft of essays.  He’d probably threaten me with libel or at least defenestration if I didn’t mention that industrious and prolific conservative that he is, he’s currently working on his third book and would be thrilled if all you Corner Kibbitzers promptly ordered a copy of his second, “Chicago Flashbulbs“, just as soon as your mouse can carry you to Amazon.com.  [To Cory: I’m here to fucking help, buddy.]

It’s good to be back.

BW

 

 

 

Promise: There Will Be Actual Content On Thursday

Four days in Chicago and the next three in a real estate class that runs from 8am to 5pm.  That kind of time sitting at a desk in a classroom is painful when you’re ten years old and the equivalent of enhanced interrogation when you’re sixty.  Trust me, I feel guilty that I’m not writing five or six hundred words every day for my devoted friends and family and the few others that have discovered the perverse joy of “Kibbitz Corner”.  But unless I can find a time machine or have myself cloned, there’s just no way to do everything or be two places at once.  I’ve got stories to tell and opinions to express, and they’ll start pouring out  on Thursday.  So now you’ve all got a reason to survive at least that long.  See you soon.

BW

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

Well, at least I hope it does.  Dr. Left, aka the King of Kibbitz Corner, is going to be off the grid for several days.  Part of the reason is that I’ll be in real estate school from 8-5 next Monday-Wednesday, since the Indiana Real Estate Commission decided that they simply didn’t have enough of my money already.  At the end of that little academic exercise, I’ll be a duly licensed real estate salesperson for another year.  Clearly, this whole retirement gig has a lot more empty hours than I ever imagined, and even I can only spend just so many of them surfing the internet for…umm…amusement.  About the time you hit midgets and clowns, you know it’s time to seek therapy.

So I’m going to try out the realtor gig in my old age.  Sadly, the law clearly states that I have to work for another principal broker for two years before I can open my own shop, so I had to abandon my dream of forming “Benny the Jew Realty, Our Motto: Have We Got A Deal For You!”  And my current boss, while he’s a really nice and open-minded guy with a lot more flexibility than some of the corporate types I know, isn’t likely to let me put that on one of his cards.  Still, I can see the billboard in my head…I’m going to need to go back to smoking cigars, but it’s a small price to pay for my new persona.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Left and I will be visiting family over the next few days, and while my desktop will be home with the housesitter and my laptop will be with my luggage, I’m still not sure I’ll have much time for blogging.  If I’m doing my job right, that should put a frown on at least a couple of faces, so I’ll promise to check in and pound out a few words if I can.  Check in from time to time.  At worst, I’ll be back at the keyboard next Thursday, April 24.  Mark your calendars.

BW

It’s All About Me

A good friend of mine, who is notable for being an accomplished and published writer herself, sarcastically commented (and let me tell you, conveying sarcasm in a post or a comment is no easy task) that whining is a great way to increase readership.  Ok, so maybe she had a point, although urging me to refrain from whining is like asking the Pacific to give it up already with all the waves.  But I think I’ve discovered an actual effective shortcut to a larger audience, short of producing genuine scintillating content, which sounds like a lot of work to me.  You just need to track down long-lost family members, especially the ones who have huge families of their own, and better still, ones who seem to have more than a passing familiarity with electronic communication and social media…and voila!  Before you know it, you’ve gone from Mr. Backwater Obscurity to Dr. Up And Coming.  Yesterday marks the first time that Kibbitz Corner broke the triple digit barrier with over a hundred page views.  A few more days like that and maybe The Daily Beast will finally start accepting my calls.

One of the best aspects of this new blog of mine, written without the counterpoint scoffing and mockery of my pragmatic and skeptical blogmate, is that I can freely explore some of my less mainstream theories and beliefs.  If there’s going to be subsequent mocking and scoffing, it’s going to have to come from the readers, and I always welcome contrarians to the discussion.  Anyway, in the last couple of days, I’ve done a lot of talking and writing about synchronicity, which is a concept at the core of the New Age bestseller “The Celestine Prophecy“.  The whole idea of synchronicity is one familiar to every homicide detective in America, which basically stated is: There are no coincidences.

My whole last week has been just one instance of synchronicity after another.  I’d just spent about a month exchanging multiple emails with my cousin Fred in Chicago.  Fred is an elderly fellow (and by that I mean someone at least a year older than me) whose hobby and passion is genealogy.  Fred has lovingly compiled as thorough a family tree of the Wendell clan as is possible with a lineage that can’t exactly be traced back to the Mayflower or the Tudors.  Most of my ancestors arrived at Ellis Island with only very limited knowledge of their own points of origin or of their own forebears much beyond parents.  Fred has long known that my father had two other children before me.  One was a son, Michael, born to Dad’s first wife, Althea, but we didn’t know where or when.  Best guess was about 1940.  The other was a girl born to his third wife (like I said before, Dad got around), Jean.  In that case, we had no further information.  Not maiden name, date of birth, or place…nada.  I’d tried to track down both of these lost Wendells over the years, with absolutely no luck.  Fred, however, was convinced that he could somehow crack the code and pull a rabbit out of his hat (don’t you just love mixed metaphors?).  In my last email to him (it was March 18…I looked it up), I wished him the best, but offered little hope of success.  Prior to Fred contacting me in March, I hadn’t given my MIA siblings much thought.  I figured that there are just some mysteries in life that are meant to be forever unsolved.

Fast forward to April 11 (4-11-14, a numeric palindrome…meaningful?) and I’m contacted out of the blue by a woman looking for information on my father, and the woman turns out to be my niece.  Her mother is the sibling I had zero expectation of ever locating.  Going from thinking about that sister, Lynn, in March, to being contacted by her daughter in April was synchronicity.  That her daughter, Tami, lives in Champaign, Illinois, where Mrs. Left and I resided before moving here, is synchronicity. That Lynn is a cat person (She has three cats. We have three cats) is synchronicity.  That Lynn and her husband are dancers (albeit squaredancers) and Mrs. Left and I are dancers is synchronicity.

But here’s where it gets weird, and where I get more convinced than ever of my most cherished vanity, that the world really does revolve around me, or as chronicled in the song by brilliant comedian Sean Morey, “It’s All About Me”.  Want to know when the last time I thought for even one second about Kansas City was?  Well, I’m not a baseball fan, so I only know that the Royals play there because I know a lot of otherwise useless information.  And I haven’t eaten meat in over fifteen years, so I haven’t paid a lot of attention to any Kansas City steaks on the menu.  But on Friday, I found that I had a whole other family living in Kansas City.  On Sunday, the lead story on the national news was of the three shootings at Jewish facilities in Kansas City.  Synchronicity.  Is there some kind of psychic message in that tragedy meant for me?  I hope not, but it still gives me goosebumps.  And as an aside, and a topic for a whole different blog post, the hate-blinded anti-Semitic bigoted murderer in Kansas got a taste of irony that could have been dished out by Rod Serling himself.  He took his gun to a Jewish Community Center and a Jewish retirement home and started firing at anyone he saw, looking to bag him some Jews…and all three of his victims were Christian.

BW

 

 

 

 

 

Good Thing It Wasn’t Aeschylus

Look, one of things I’ve discovered about this column is that people actually seem to read it, and some of them don’t take kindly to some of my attempts at humor.  The whole “dick-head” bicycle helmet incident comes to mind.  And one of the things I learned writing my previous blog, “Left, Right, and Centered”, is that among my readership was a certain predatory species, homo attorneyus disgustens.  That unfortunate revelation resulted in a rather expensive life lesson involving the concept of copyright infringement.  Having no particular inclination toward becoming more familiar with the finer legal points of slander and libel, I want to preface this piece with a little disclaimer: It’s intended as HUMOR (also, stop me when I’m lyin’.)

It’s bad enough that IU has a reputation for having the most reliably beatable football team in the Big Ten.  No matter how far they lower the bar, the Fighting Hoosiers can never seem to put enough W’s up to qualify for even the Roto-Rooter Toilet Bowl, let alone one of the prestigious games like…The Duck Commander Independence Bowl (I am NOT making this up).  And Tom Crean’s basketball program is lately most famous for taking some of the best recruits in America and molding them into a team almost magical in its ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Even up the road in Indy, the Colts are renowned for invariably choking in the big game.

So if IU isn’t going gain its fame on the gridiron or the hardwood, you’d kind of hope that they’d make their mark in the classroom.  And every year, IU places right up there in the US News College Rankings.  The Kelly School of Business and Jacobs School of Music are routinely in the top tier.

But here’s the deal, and this is just personal observation: College students are morons.  The sheer number of them who can make it through four years of undergrad and another two to four of post-grad and still not be capable of composing a coherent sentence or knowing the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re” is simply staggering.  

It must be a particularly proud day for IU.  I’m sure that when Michael McRobbie awakened this morning and scanned Huffington Post for the day’s headlines, he felt a surge of delight when he saw the following headline (again, I’m not making this up): Worst “Wheel Of Fortune” Contestant Ever Blows Chance At $1 Million Prize.  It was college week on Wheel, and the contestant in question was an IU honors student, who had a puzzle before him with ALL the letters filled in.  All he had to do was READ the answer.  Go ahead and play the video in the link and watch for the 1:30 mark, where the honors student in question reads aloud: Mythological Hero Achilles.  Sadly for him, reading is apparently his Ay-Chill-Us heel.

BW