A locker room attendant is a person of interest in the Deflate Gate controversy. The guy says he thinks the media is blowing this way under proportion.
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New England quarterback Tom Brady‘s kids say they’re afraid to play in a bounce house when their dad is nearby.
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Former Royals star Billy Butler says he wouldn’t mind wearing a Royals uniform again. Apparently, the A’s don’t make plus sizes. Continue reading
The foregoing was the title of a non-sense poem for children by Lewis Carroll, the 19th century Englishman who also wrote Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass…
My grandfather was active in a fraternal group for the lumber business called “The Royal Order of The Hoo-Hoos”. Its titular head was called “Grand Snark of The Universe.”.Although the meaning of the word “snark” has changed in the last century, from “silly” to “snide”, or “cutting”, Carroll’s title still has a nice ring to it.
If it’s snark you want (in the latter day sense) you need go no further than the critic Daniel Mendelsohn, who writes for The New Yorker. I came across this toxic muse when checking the reviews of a book I very much enjoyed, “The Parthenon Enigma” by Joan Connelly. Connelly is a professor of Archaeology at New York University.
In her new book, Connelly makes a persuasive case for a new explanation of one of the salient features of the ancient building. 9-11 got Connelly thinking about the striking parallels between that event and the disaster that happened to Athens in the fifth century B.C., when the city fell to the Persians and was destroyed by the invaders. Connelly wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal in 2002 about the points of resemblance between the two national calamities and how both nations could come back from the tragedies by rebuilding and by reaffirming their national identity with a fitting memorial.
The events of 9-11 also caused the author to revisit the conclusions she’d reached in a scholarly article she’d written five years before. Continue reading
The Kansas City Star headlined its story on the recent water park death of a young black girl, “Three KC teens charged with murder in slaying of 14-year-old Alexis Kane.”
The Star is hardly unique in its use of the word “teen.”
For the media in general, the word serves two functions. One is to diminish the severity of the crime. If “teens” do it, even if the teens are old enough to be charged as adults as these three are, it cannot be all that serious.
The second function is to make the age of the perpetrators the most important identifier.
By classifying the three killers as “teens,” the Star does not need to touch on the subject of race, about which its editors are positively squeamish unless, of course, the perpetrator is white or at least a “white Hispanic.” Continue reading
Emanuel Cleaver
“My hope is that they will come out tomorrow and repent,” the right reverend Emanuel Cleaver told his fellow reverend Al Sharpton last week…
The “they” in question are Republicans. Apparently, they need to “repent” for criticizing Obama.
Repentance begins at home, and our favorite Missouri congressman has much to repent for, the car wash scam being the least of his sins. Much uglier was Cleaver’s role in “Spittlegate,” a racial incident he helped manufacture to defame the tea party and further divide the nation.
In March 2010, protestors gathered on Capitol Hill to protest the impending passage of Obamacare. That afternoon a few members of the Black Caucus, including Andre Carson of Indiana and civil rights icon John Lewis, chose to skip the tunnel and walk through the gathered crowds.
As Carson told reporters, he and Lewis were “walking down the steps” of the Cannon Office Building when they heard ‘n-word, n-word,’ at least fifteen times, hundreds of people.” This was nuts. When questioned on specifics, Carson reduced the hundreds of people to “maybe fifteen,” who were shouting “Kill the bill, then the n-word.”
This was still nuts. Continue reading
The reason President Obama stayed at the Lawrence Holiday Inn?
It’s really quite simple, he had no choice.
With an entourage of more than 100 people, no way could arguably ritzier hotels like the historic Eldridge in downtown Lawrence (48 rooms) or shiny, new Oread overlooking the KU campus (99 rooms) get the job done.
Whereas as a convention hotel, Holiday Inn was up to the task.
And even at that, “They had to move a lot of people out,” says one Lawrence retailer who asked not to be named. “So when (Obama) stayed there, everybody else had to leave – they moved everybody to different hotels. We had people in the store here talking about that they had to move.”
On a more positive note, Holiday Inn Lawrence VP of sales Ivan Simac says the hotel was more than happy to accommodate the prez, albeit on less than a week’s notice.
“It was a lot of work for us to pull all this together, but of course it was a privilege,” Simac says. “I think that due to our size and our location right off the highway, we were the perfect location to fit their needs.”
And for those who may be wondering, yes indeed, the Holiday Inn Lawrence has a Presidential Suite. Continue reading
Although rural Kansas school districts do not have anything like the seventy-four $100K-plus employees of the Blue Valley District or the sixty-two $100K-plus employees in Shawnee Mission, they don’t do half bad – especially compared to the people paying their salaries…
Ford County, for instance, ranks 94th out of 105 Kansas counties in median per capita income at $19,348 per year. Median household income in Ford County is just $46,621 a year. The county seat of Ford County is Dodge City. At least 300 employees of the Dodge City School District earn more than the median HOUSEHOLD in Ford County. And that does not include generous benefits that range up to 35 percent of salary.
Some 442 employees in that district make more than $40,000 a year, and not many teachers make much less than that. This may not seem like a lot to Johnson Countians, but in rural Kansas that salary goes a long way, especially considering that teachers typically get their summers off.
Or do they? Continue reading
Perception is everything…
But President Obama overnighting at the Holiday Inn during his visit to Lawrence?
Give me a break.
Was it the indoor pool at the Holidome? The daily housekeeping, the self-laundry facilities, ATM or limited fitness center that attracted the White House’s biggest fish to the hotel? A hotel chain that was tongue-in-cheek named after the 1942 Bing Crosby Fred Astaire Christmas movie?
If the lodging had to be in Lawrence, why not the historic Eldridge downtown? You know, the one a prominent local toured as a possible site for his daughter’s wedding, only to find a pair of whitey tighteys dangling from a hook on the entry door. Or what about the stately-looking Oread high on a hill overlooking the KU campus?
Of course, flying into Topeka could have also meant an exciting night at T-town’s Ramada Convention Center or the Senate Luxury Suites. Continue reading
KU basketball coach Bill Self is out to win his 11th straight Big 12 title…
And the Jayhawks just might get that job done – maybe. But it will be a season long battle for Self’s solid but not overpowering ball club. That’s because he really has no big time stars this year and because of that his loses have been huge ones.
The air seemed to go out of KU’s tires after that early massacre by Kentucky (72-40). KU looked like a bunch of kids playing men. Kentucky platooned two squads against Self’s team and just walked all over Kansas.
Yes, most experts felt Kentucky was the best team out there, but KU was talked up as being a top 5 team. A team that maybe could at least battle Kentucky. The answer was clearly NO WAY. The huge loss rocked the Jayhawk faithful and it was immediately clear that without a massive and fast improvement Kansas would just be an also ran nationally. Continue reading
Higher education is so expensive…
Our leaders all express concern over student debt. Condoleezza Rice said access to education is, ”the civil rights struggle of our day.” President Obama says we should tax “The Rich” to pay for Community College for the poor.
But has anybody bothered to ask the institutions of higher learning to explain their expenditures?
Earlier this week, Kansas University spokeswoman Errin Barcomb-Peterson announced that a seven-passenger Cessna Citation CJ4 was delivered Dec. 23 and has already been used on some school trips.
The exact price of the plane was not announced, but the purchase came from a grant that could not exceed $8.1 million. Keep in mind, this is the purchase price, not the use and maintenance costs. Continue reading
What a great year for people in Seattle to celebrate getting another BOWL!
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Google will lease bandwidth from Sprint to provide high-speed internet access to customers. It’s the best thing to happen to Sprint since Gary Forsee left town in 2007.
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The Marlboro Man just died at age 85. His ashes will be spread just outside the entrance to your office building.
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Tom Trigg
Employees of the Blue Valley School District have got to enjoy the chronic editorial handwringing about the alleged underfunding of public schools…
In between calls to their stockbrokers and money managers, this has to be a subject of great amusement among them.
For the record, they are doing quite well.
The benefits are solid and their vacation days are the envy of the working world. Continue reading
The featured Kansas City Star headline reads as follows, “Kathleen Sebelius criticizes Gov. Sam Brownback’s vision for Kansas.”
This is one of two prominent Brownback-bashing articles in Wednesday’s newspaper – by freelance political writer Steve Kraske – a slow day for the anti-Brownback fetishists on Grand Boulevard. Specifically, Sebelius accused Brownback of having a “failed and flawed vision.”
No, you are not mistaken.
This is the same Kathleen Sebelius who orchestrated the notorious rollout of Obamacare, the same Sebelius whom Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts wanted fired for “gross incompetence,” the same Sebelius whom even Democrats criticized for gross incompetence.
“What has happened is unacceptable,” said Nancy Pelosi of the rollout. Continue reading
SUPER BOWL SCANDAL! DEFLATIONGATE! BALLGHAZI!
In case you’ve been somewhere under a rock—or, you know, not in front of a television or a computer or a newspaper or a radio for the past couple of days—here’s the biggest story in the week-and-a-half leading up to the Super Bowl:
In the AFC Championship game, Indianapolis Colts linebacker D’Qwell Jackson intercepted a second quarter Tom Brady pass and said, “Holy shit. This feels a bit soft, son.” He then handed the ball to the ref and expressed his concern. An investigation into the soft ball was made and it led to the revelation that 11 of the 12 balls used by New England didn’t meet the NFL’s inflation requirements, which is a thing you probably didn’t even think about being a thing until now.
But it is. Continue reading
That issue started getting sensitive on August 9, 2014, with the (since justified) police shooting of strong-arm robber, Michael Brown, a.k.a. “the gentle giant.”
The issue got a whole lot more sensitive in a 24-hour period beginning last Wednesday when seven people were murdered in St. Louis in six separate incidents. Continue reading
In the same week that the Kansas City Star will editorialize rhapsodically about Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, one in which he will lay out the numerous new ways in which he plans to keep increasing the national debt – free community college, anyone? – its editors predictably lashed Kansas Governor Sam Brownback for his conscientious efforts to control spending in Kansas.
Again!
The Star editors bash Brownback not out of principled resistance, no longer even to boot him from office. No, their Brownback-bashing shows all the signs of a flaming case of obsessive compulsive disorder.
So pronounced is the Star editors’ OCD that they actually criticized Brownback’s proposed tax increase on alcohol and cigarettes.
This may well be the first tax in recent bi-state history that its editors have slammed. Continue reading
Turns out Joe Posnanski was a prophet…
Three years ago the former Kansas City Star sports columnist took a ton of heat for his puff piece biography of disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.
You know, the dude who turned the other cheek while convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky helped him become the winningest NCAA Division One football coach ever.
Take, Deadspin’s “A Plea to Joe Posnanski to Stop Writing Mealy-Mouthed Nonsense About Joe Paterno.”
Dead spin’s Tom Scocca quoted Posnanski from Sports Illustrated as follows:
“I asked Paterno at one point in that last month if he hoped that people would come to see and measure his full life rather than a single, hazy event involving an alleged child molester. ‘It doesn’t matter what people think of me,’ he said. ‘I’ve lived my life. I just hope the truth comes out. And I hope the victims find peace.'”
“A single, hazy event,” Scocca wrote.
“A single, hazy event.
“Jerry Sandusky is charged with 52 criminal offenses, spanning 15 years, against 10 different victims. Presumably Posnanski is referring to the one incident in which Mike McQueary, a graduate assistant coach at the time, said he had seen Sandusky anally raping a boy in the Penn State football showers and reported the rape to Paterno…
“The question Posnanski posed to Paterno is vapid nonsense. He was asking the old man to bullshit him. It’s like the Washington Post‘s Sally Jenkins declining to challenge Paterno when he told her he’d “never heard of rape and a man. Continue reading
Heard on the street; that Winter 2015 is o-v-e-r…
Retailers are fire selling off winter coats, Paul Wilson’s primping his new above ground pool in Olathe, Harley’s waxing his surfboard and Jack Frost is nowhere to be found.
Time to mothball the snowblowers and tune up the lawnmowers?
No way, says KSHB TV weather wonk Gary Lezak.
“This winter there’s a warm pattern and a cold pattern and we just went through the warm pattern,” Lezak says. “We’ve had below average snowfall – but we’ve had 4 1/2 inches of snow so far – do you realize it’s snowed six times already this month?”
Get outta town.
“Seriously, one time it was .2 of an inch, another time it was .2 of an inch, then we had three inches one night. You know, 4 1/2 inches of snow by the end of January isn’t much. So far we’ve averaged 1/2 an inch of snow each time.”
So no May blizzards, like a couple years back?
“It can happen,” Lezak says. “But it’s not going to happen this year.”
And what of the talk that winter 2015 is done for? Continue reading
Well, at least I picked the right teams to win…
Too bad Indy just got walked on so bad that even the 13 points in the tease didn’t help.
Most fans will be pulling for the New England Patriots and Tom Brady.
It’s Tom’s sixth Super Bowl and nobody has six. A win would secure the title BEST QUARTERBACK OF ALL TIME for Brady. And he may already be just that.
The Pats played the perfect game crushing the Colts from the opening bell.
It was a 45-7 win with many records broken by the Pats. Indy is the AFC team of the future. Just not right now. Mister Blunt ran over the Colts like they weren’t there. Three touchdowns in both games were a record for any back in the post season. Continue reading
WWE wrestler The Miz
Killed by the public, the press gave it a free pass…
That’s right, for years we were subjected to fawning stories about this idiotic product in the mainstream press. There were numerous pictures of Google cofounders Sergey and Larry at parties, looking like the dorks that they are, until suddenly barroom backlash surfaced in San Francisco and the media woke up to the fact that Google Glass might be an undesired product.
And there you have the modern media paradigm in a nutshell.
The nitwit organizations trumpet everything made by people with money and the truth comes from the public. The inane writers tell us every movie and album is good until someone checks the sales charts thereafter and finds out that they’re stiffs.
How did this happen? How did reporters seeking out truth miss it?
Because they saw themselves as reporters and not analysts, just getting the facts, giving credence to every contrary opinion. Just like on TV all the anchors employ happy talk, all writers believe if you don’t contain the opposite viewpoint in your article you’re not doing your job. And that opinion should be left…on the opinion page.
So therefore, newspapers have turned into sales catalogs, no wonder the younger generation ignores them. Continue reading
This just in…
Clint Eastwood’s movie American Sniper took in $90.2 million domestic 3-day opening weekend – double the industry’s prediicted numbers.
The anticipated 4-day Martin Luther King weekend gross: $105 million.
Exit poll scoring: A to A+.
Warner Brothers distribution chief Dan Fellman called it the perfect storm.
“The movie is going to have great legs and it’s going to continue to break records,” Fellman said. “It’s going to go down in history.” Continue reading
