"Klotz" As In "Blood"

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It’s a wonder I can think at all.” –Paul Simon, Kodachrome

D’accord. But it’s no wonder why high school is such crapspray, and I’m not even talking about Miami-Dade’s rectal/cranial inversion over Vamos a Cuba. Just look who runs the schools and make decisions about what’s taught, and how, and by whom.

Voters in Broward County, who will select candidates for school board in the impending primary, found the following extra-large post card ad in their mailboxes this week:

Nothing like deploying the charm and moral authority of toothless, wizened, ancient, dried-up white folks to grip your attention, gain your sympathy, and cement your argument, right? I mean, if THESE fine specimens of modern Broward County citizen aren’t on your side, there’s something amiss with you, right?

It gets better. Here’s the flip side:

Even assuming the accuracy of all these allegations (hard to read, but they’re all DUI’s and other arrests), what does this approach tell you about the candidate who points them out regarding her opponent? Why would she focus on character assassination to the exclusion of any discussion regarding her (or her opponent’s) credentials? What kind of lowlife classless gossip resorts to diversionary maneuvers like this?

Furthermore, without downplaying the seriousness of a docket full of convictions, the number of people I know personally who have had problems with police, particularly in Hollywood, and the experiences they’ve reported at the hands of that rudderless authority, suggests to me that maybe the candidate’s problem isn’t as bad as it sounds. My own experiences with Hollywood police are overwhelmingly bad, a topic I’ll get back to some time, and in south Florida generally, documented incidents of cops out of control, sanctioned by high authority, are legion (and don’t forget that fine FTAA incident with “the lady in red“). Seems like anybody with an enemy somewhere can find himself in trouble with somebody’s hired cop. Maybe this candidate is one of them.

Or maybe he’s a stumbling drunken piece of shit. Hard to tell, but why bother? Whatever he is, the candidate who sent this around reveals herself to be something much lower. BTW — it’s Carole Andrews, the incumbent, although her name appears only once, in tiny print, on the mailing. And she spells her opponent’s name wrong, too: It’s “D’Emilia” with an apostrophe.

Neither Democrat nor Republican, I don’t get to vote in primaries like this one. If I did, be sure I’d wash my hands on the way out of the voting booth.

Update:  more on Broward police here.  Thanks CM.

….the Continuing Adventures of Monkey Boy

You want politics, blogs and websites exist by the mega-plethora to entertain you. Leave me out. Mostly. But every now and then somebody more or less sends me a subpoena commanding me to piss bile in public. This time it’s President Monkey Boy.

“I may be the only person, the only presidential candidate who never carried the state in which he was born,” President Bush said Monday. — New York Times

Duh-hyuk! Read a book, willya?

He was dodging the question about backing Jew Lieberman, who failed in his attempt to win the nomination of his own Connecticut Democrats, largely on his support of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration generally. (He also advocated Federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair, and his comments on religion have made many First Amendment advocates uneasy, to say the least.) Lieberman is now running as an Independent, and Republicans nationwide have expressed sympathy for him while turning their backs on his Republican opponent, a nameless non-entity whose own polls give him a record-breaking 4% of the vote.

President Monkey Boy noted that despite the fact that he had been born in New Haven (CT), he failed to carry the state in both presidential campaigns. So he was steering clear of the electorate, the state, and the controversy.

Interesting that Monkey Boy finally mentions in public that he’s not a genuine born and bred Texan, as he likes to portray himself, but actually of Gnu Wingland vintage like Killer Ted Kennedy, Milquetoast Dukakis, and FlipFlop Kerry. He attended Yale (CT) and Harvard (MA), certainly on pure merit (a regular bootstrapper, himself) and didn’t buy the famous Crawford TX ranch until 1999.

But back to Go. As the Times points out, among the many presidential candidates who failed to carry their own home states are George McGovern, Adlai Stevenson, and Hubert Humphrey. (In some cases, e.g., Humphrey, these candidates’ home states are not the ones in which they attained their status. Humphrey was big in Minnesota, but his home state was South Dakota). Also Adlai Stevenson, Al Smith, James Cox, James K. Polk, George McClellan, and both John Kerry and his lookalike, Abraham Lincoln. Heard of Lincoln, Mr. President? He was a President just like you.

But best of all, there was George Herbert Walker Bush, Monkey Boy’s regular real-time father, who was born in Massachusetts, a state he never carried. W just musta forgot.

In the great scheme of things, his howler is but a minor stumble, a very insignificant statement of utter stupidity that amounts to little or nothing. Which about sums up the entire last 6 years, unless you count among your family and friends those dead American soldiers whose coffins we’re not allowed to see.

SALTY COVERED NUTS, ANYONE?

Kesnosha, WS – Darmin Garcia, an employee of a company that supplies chocolate ingredients, was pushing the chocolate down into the vat at Debelis Corp. because it was stuck. But it became loose and he slid into the hopper, waist deep.

The chocolate was 110 degrees, hotter than a hot tub. Co-workers, police, and firefighters tried to free the man but couldn’t get him loose until the chocolate was thinned out with cocoa butter. (Yahoo News)

When he discovered he couldn’t free himself unassisted, Garcia began hollering, “Fire! Fire!” which brought co-workers running to the scene. Asked later why, Garcia replied “Who would have helped if I yelled ‘Chocolate! Chocolate!’?”

SWEET MOTHER OF GOD

Fountain Valley, CA – At Bodega Chocolates, workers claim a 2-inch-tall column of chocolate drippings bears a striking resemblance to the Virgin Mary.

Chocolate drippings usually harden in thin, flat strips on wax paper, but this confection has a wide base and tapers gently toward a rounded top, giving the appearance of a female figure with her head tilted slightly to the right. The dark brown melting chocolate hardened into subtle layers that resemble the folds of a gown and a flowing veil. A tiny white circle, about the size of a pencil eraser, sits in the upper center of the creation. A worker said the white speck is the head of the Baby Jesus as he is held in Mary’s folded arms. — South Florida.com news

Not everybody is convinced. “This happens about once a month,” pointed out an employee who would only give his name as “Jesus” (no, not that one). “It usually means the machine needs to be flushed out. If anything, that chunk looks like the Mexican cleaning women that come here at night.”

In case you missed it, yesterday (Aug 20) was the 20th anniversary of the deadliest case of “Going Postal” on record.

On Aug. 20, 1986, Patrick Henry Sherrill tucked two .45-caliber pistols into his postal satchel, locked the doors of a post office in this Oklahoma City suburb and systematically killed 14 people, then committed suicide.

”The screams hurt me emotionally more than the bullet did when it hit my back,” said Bigler, one of six people wounded in the attack. “They screamed in terror when they screamed their last breath. He wanted to slaughter us all.”

In the two decades since Sherrill’s rampage, the U.S. Postal Service has tried to prevent worker violence, but there have been other attacks. Nearly 50 people have died in post office violence since the 1980s, including six postal workers who were shot in January at a mail-processing center in Santa Barbara, Calif., by a former postal worker who killed herself. — Miami Hurled, 8/20/06

This morning I reach “Cap” Stickum, whose kicked off a career with the Post Office as a letter carrier in 1970, and went on to serve as an officer in the union, retiring last December.

“That was a bad one,” he confirms. “That’s the one that got people wondering what it is about the Post Office that brings about these things.”

Sore feet? Crabby customers? Boredom? Psychopathic personalities?

“Well, no more than anywhere else. You can’t tell me that normal people wanna be cops, firemen, or sewer workers. Or teachers, fer chrissake. Who’s more twisted than teachers?”

Priests?

“But here’s the thing. Twenty-five years in the union and I meet thousands of postal workers. I ask ‘em what they like about their jobs, and they say, Good benefits, Regular paycheck, I like working outdoors most of the time, like that. Once in a while somebody says they like working with people or they like their colleagues, but not often. But nobody ever says they like the work they do. Nobody becomes a postal service employee because they like delivering mail, or licking stamps, or serving the public.”

No Philatelists need apply, eh?

“Even teachers, you find people who say they like education, they like teaching, they find the job rewarding. In 25 years, no postal employee ever told me they found the job ‘rewarding’. So you got a bunch of bored careerists watching the clock and waiting to retire for 35 years. That’s tough. People snap.”

So what’s on tap for the 20th anniversary?

“Nothing. Nada. Typically, we ‘re pretending it never happened. Why draw attention to the fact that there’s a gigantic uniformed labor force packed with armed psychotic maniacs visiting every residence and building in America on a daily basis?”

I was hoping for a commemorative stamp, at least.

“Sure you were. And I guess you’re hoping somebody breaks the record of 14 dead and 6 wounded in a single attack, too.”

Not while I’m on the premises, no.

“Well, it could always happen. But I’m outta there. And I’m outa here, too.” He hangs up.

The post office is one of the many institutions I avoid at all costs, along with banks, municipal services offices, and (recently) FEMA. It’s just too infuriating to conduct business with the army of paper-pushing morons who staff these industries. It’s enough to send a man postal. Patrick Henry Sherrill, I can relate.