Oh great. California cancer chips.

EXPENSIVE BUT OFTEN WORTHLESS DIPLOMAS.

Friday, our pal Marla Jo Fisher wrote about the many graduates of local vocational schools who find that their diplomas, though costly, profiteth them nothing (Students wanted jobs, but got debt instead).

Marla informs us that “Each year, some 400,000 students are enrolled in the state's for-profit schools. At last count, 160 of such schools were operating in Orange County.”

160!

WHITE PUNK ON DOPE.

This morning’s New York Times discusses the saga of the making of “What We Do Is Secret,” a movie about the 70’s Hollywood punk band The Germs (A Phoenix of a Film Exhumes a Punk Prince).

Germs' singer Darby Crash committed suicide in 1980, all according to plan:

In 1975, at the age of 17, he devised a five-year plan for achieving immortality: form a band, collect a following, release one album, then commit suicide. … On the night of Dec. 7, 1980, Crash injected a lethal dose of heroin and lay down in his leather jacket.

It was a good plan. Unfortunately, John Lennon died the next day and so, today, only fans of punk remember the Darbster.

WHITE PUNK ON OED.

Also in today’s Times—a terrific review of a book that recounts author Ammon Shea's reading of the entire Oxford English Dictionary (From A to Zyxt):

Shea is well equipped for the task he has set himself. He owns about a thousand dictionaries, which he keeps on shelves in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Alix, who teaches psychology courses at Barnard. Some of the dictionaries he bought from a book dealer named Madeline, who lives in a loft in Lower Manhattan. Madeline owns 20,000 dictionaries. She taught Shea, he says, “the ineffable joy that can be had in pursuing the absurd.”

Amazingly, Shea’s word odyssey sounds interesting. The book is divided into chapters, each one a letter in the dictionary, Chapter A to Chapter Z:

Months in, Shea arrives—back-aching, crabby, page-blind—at Chapter N. “Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language,” he writes, his verbal cortex overflowing. “It is,” he observes, “like trying to remember all the trees one sees through the window of a train.” Once he stares for a while, amazed, at the word glove. “I find myself wondering why I’ve never seen this odd term that describes such a common article of clothing.”

I recall playing “Boggle,” a word game, with my brother Ray. I claimed the word “four” (pronounced, it seems, to rhyme with “Bauer”). Ray looked at me. “That’s not a word,” he declared. I wasn't sure. We looked it up in a dictionary.

Soon, we burst out laughing. The Bauers don't need no stinkin' dictionary reading marathon to manage to look at an utterly familiar word and to not recognize it!

YOU SAY "POTATO," I SAY "ACRYLAMIDE".

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle informs us that “Frito-Lay and two other potato chip companies have agreed to reduce the levels of a cancer-causing chemical in their products in a settlement of a state lawsuit….” Or so said California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

Evidently, the culprit is something called acrylamide. The stuff is “used industrially for treating sewage….” It is present in lots of fried potato products:

Besides Frito-Lay, which sells most of the potato chips in California, the other companies agreeing to reduce acrylamide levels are Kettle Foods, maker of Kettle Chips, and Lance Inc., maker of Cape Cod Chips, Brown's office said. In another settlement last week, Heinz agreed to cut in half the acrylamide levels in Ore-Ida frozen french fries and tater tots and pay $600,000 in penalties and costs, the state said. … Procter & Gamble agreed in January to reduce acrylamide by 50 percent in Pringles potato chips. McDonald's, KFC, Wendy's and Burger King agreed last year to post warnings about acrylamide in chips and fries.

Nobody knew it was in these chips until a few years ago.

Good grief.

INFAMOUS SERBIAN FUGITIVE PRACTICED ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE.

On Friday, physicist Bob Park noted that mass murderer Radovan Karadzic was finally arrested after 13 years.

How, Bob asks, could the fellow support himself in hiding all this time? Says Bob,

"No problem. He practiced alternative medicine, which requires little more than a lack of scruples. He was fully qualified."

TUBES: "White Punks On Dope" (circa 1977)