Sunday, August 26, 2007

Crap in a can

HEY, BALLOONS BURN!

Last Thursday, the OC Reg reported once again on our county’s BIG ORANGE BALLOON (BOB). Now, I like BOB. I’ve been pumping BOB up for months.

Yesterday afternoon, Rebel Girl called me from the very foot of BOB. She and the gang were planning to take a BOB ride, but the wind was up and so BOB was grounded.

Then, last night, I noticed a news story entitled Two people confirmed dead in hot-air balloon tragedy, near Vancouver.

The story is awful. It includes phrases like “big ball of fire.” How can that be?

Shouldn’t these balloons be fireproof? I mean, what with the abject Hindenburgitude of the very idea of a friggin’ BALLOON, I just assumed they were! —But no. Not that one in Vancouver, anyway.

CRAP IN A CAN:

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my sister at the hospital. Owing to her kidney failure, she was required to drink some crap in a can. She told me about it. “What’s it called?” I asked.

Beneful, I think,” said Fannie. “Something like that.”

I said: “Beneful? Isn’t that the name of some kinda dog food?”

Turns out this “Beneful” has a truly disgusting taste. It even smells bad. It was stinkin’ up the room.

Fannie’s friend Angela came by and sipped some of it. She gagged. (To be honest, Angela does more than her share of puking and gagging.)

Turns out lots of patients are routinely given this drink along with their lunchtime rubber chicken. It wasn’t just Fannie.

So Fannie told the doctors, “Listen, this Beneful tastes like shit. I guarantee that nobody’s drinking it.”

They stared. They sniffed it. They looked at each other. They stared some more.

Near as I can tell, it was later determined that, probably, lots of patients were dumping their Beneful instead of drinking it, cuz, well, it really does taste like shit. Medically, that was very bad, it seems.

Evidently, nobody had bothered to say that their daily Beneful tasted like shit. Some just held their noses and drank it. Others just passed on it. Nobody in that hospital had put two and two together.

MORE CRAP IN A CAN:

All this talk of post-Hindenburgian burning balloons and idiotic crap-in-can imbibery reminds me of our district and Raghu P. Mathur’s new contract. Somebody told me that there’s a rumor that Raghu has installed bulletproof glass in his office. If so, then at least he understands the absurdity of his new contract. You’ve gotta give him credit for that.

There’s a BOARD OF TRUSTEES meeting tomorrow night.

I perused the agenda.

The trustees are poised to adopt the Final Budget for 2007-2008 and a whole slew of new or improved board policies.

Among “information items”:

• Draft responses to the Accreditation reports (on the two colleges)
• The cost of security cameras

I’ll try to be there. I must be nuts.

Suffragette City

SATURDAY found Rebel Girl and her two men in attendance at the Women For Suffrage Day Celebration at the University Club at UCI.

What's Women For? Let's take a look at the recent write-up in the OC Weekly, written by one Andrew Tonkovich:
Women For is the local Orange County grassroots organization you’d point to if you wanted to mess with people’s minds, and who doesn’t want to do that? This Irvine-based progressive women’s forum hosts monthly public-education meetings in the heart of conservative South County when it isn’t sponsoring the Great American Write-In each spring. Sure, the nice ladies at WF: OC look harmless, but they’ve lately featured films, panels and speakers on global warming (against), voter-rights suppression (against), single-payer health care (for), uniting women in prison with their kids (for) and military recruitment in the schools (against). They pay for all this terrific agit-prop by dressing up once a year, having lunch together, and honoring some of the other riot grrrls and women who live and work in the OC.

This year’s Suffrage Day Celebration honorees include Professor Paula Garb of UC Irvine’s Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, Susan Kopicki of Democracy for America, Jeanette Merrilees of Save Crystal Cove and two Cal State Fullerton political-science majors who persuaded their campus to go sweatshop-free—which means you’ll have to find someplace else to buy a T-shirt sewn by exploited Central American labor. (See, I am messing with you, and it’s fun!) CSUF Criminal Justice Professor Jarett Lovell (host of KUCI-FM’s Justice, or Just Us?) introduces the young women, Caitlyn Whitney and Charlotte Samuels of the Campus Coalition Against Sweatshops, everybody enjoys some bitchen chow courtesy of UCI’s snazzy University Club, and then it’s back to kickin’ right-wing reactionary ass . . . er, I mean educating our citizenry on a variety of important peace, human-rights, social and economic-justice issues.
You get the idea. Some fun if you like this kind of fun. We do. Three years ago the group saw fit to honor Rebel Girl. So there we were, hand shaking with local activists and elected officials: Irvine mayor Beth Krom, former mayor and now councilmember Larry Agran and councilmember Sukhee Kang. (Did Rebel Girl ever tell about the time that she and Red Emma got arrested with Mayor Agran out in Nevada? No? —Another time.)

Anyway, nothing like meeting with a community college professor to make local elected officials gush about the great services the colleges provide the community. Really. That was nice. And when queried about the state of the colleges, (What do you think of Glenn? How's it going over there now? Any, uh, better? Who chose the color for the new Performing Arts Center? ) Rebel Girl took the high road for the most part. Really. Or at least the carpool lane on the high road. It was easy. These are smart people. They don't need Rebel Girl to confirm what they know.

Rebel Girl and her family were joined at their table by SOCCCD trustee Marcia Milchiker, who reported on one thing and another: her recent study abroad trip to Santander, Spain (that hot bed of international terrorism and anti-American sentiment), as well as the board's summer activities and developments. There's a lot going on but Rebel Girl won't get into here. It's not the time and place. Really.

Both Marcia and Rebel Girl were happy to see former IVC VP of Student Services, Pauline Merry in attendance, looking elegant as usual. Pauline, one of the early casualties of the current regime, had gone on to Long Beach City College and now, years later, has retired. She, too, was once an honoree at another Suffrage Day Celebration.

The lunch ended after the pair of students from Cal State Fullerton were honored for their successful campaign to persuade CSUF to drop their contract with exploitive sweatshops which made me want to rush right home and see where her IVC t-shirt was manufactured.

The answer: her Fruit of the Loom heavy cotton t-shirt was "assembled in Mexico of U.S.A. fabric." This means, Red Emma quips, that the fabric made the two minute trip across the border to the maquiladoras or, in American, sweatshops. The irony of American students wearing college apparel assembled by their systematically disenfranchised peers in other countries is pretty heavy.

Anyone want a cause this academic year? Rebel Girl is sure that the two Cal State Fullerton students would be happy to help.

Suffragette City

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...