Tuesday, January 4, 2011

"Polyurinated" —January, a year ago

     Regular readers of DtB might be wondering why we’ve posted so little in recent days. Well, the main reason is that I’ve got a bad cold. With luck, in the morning, I’ll be well enough to go to our new chancellor’s “opening session.”
     Maybe not. I still feel like crap.
     I was hoping to write a piece reviewing the events of the past year, as reported by DtB, but I’m not up for that. So I settled for a brief piece about what was going on a year ago (i.e., the month of January 2010).

POWERFUL RIGHT-WING HOMOPHOBES:

Typical Mathurian "keynote speaker": PRI's Lance Izumi
     A year ago, Raghu Mathur was still Chancellor, and the Spring “opening session” featured a presentation about our economic future by one of Mathur’s Republican cronies, Chris Harrington, a VP at Toshiba America Info Systems. That went pretty well. But it irked me that, over the years, so many of these events featured noted Republicans and “business leaders” with close ties to the GOP. At least Harrington wasn’t pushing a right-wing agenda, as was Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi, a foe of public education. [Correction: as an officer of PRI, Izumi undoubtedly is a foe of public education, though he wasn't attacking public education during his visit.]
     Remember those crazy Ugandan politicians who pursued a bill that would permit the execution of “homosexuals”? We wrote about all of that a year ago. Turns out they were brought to their level of focus and enthusiasm re the “homosexual” menace by a series of wacky Americans evengelical Christians, including one Scott Lively, a self-described expert on “curing” homosexuality.
     That name rang a bell, and so I did a little research. Sure enough, Lively is among the religious nuts who’ve been pushing the “homosexual Armageddon” notion. He’s part of a crowd that includes David Llewellyn, who has long been up to his eyeballs in evangelical homophobia.
     Llewellyn, of course, is one of the chief attorneys defending the district (against a crew of “heathens,” to use Nancy Padberg’s term) in the ongoing Westphal v. Wagner “prayer” case.
     Tom Fuentes’ pal Howard Ahmanson, Jr. has been a big contributor to some of Llewellyn’s anti-gay and evangelical efforts. Not long ago, the Ahmansons gave a big chunk of change to Rick Warren (of OC’s own Saddleback Church). Warren is among the evangelicals who has visited Uganda in recent years, giving some Ugandan lawmakers peculiar notions about homosexuality (which Warren has compared to pedophelia).

Saddleback Church's Rick Warren
OUR RIGHT-WING LUNATIC TRADITION:

     A year ago, I did a little looking into the namesake of Saddleback’s strangely fortress-like Utt Library: Congressman James B. Utt. According to an old LA Times article,
James B. Utt … helped Orange County gain a national reputation as a hotbed of archconservatism…. "Utt the Nut," his enemies called him. He was elected to Congress in 1952 and handily won reelection until his death in 1970. Each year Utt introduced a bill to eliminate the federal income tax. He also tried to pass a constitutional amendment which would recognize Jesus Christ as America's authority figure. He opposed all civil rights legislation, but gained national fame, however, when he argued that rock 'n roll was a communist plot.
JOHN WILLIAMS AND LUNCH MEAT:

     We’ve long tried to get Jennifer Muir of the OC Register to take a look at trustee John Williams’ longstanding practice of spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on trips to Orlando and the like. She finally came through with an article.
     She also dug up a curious factoid: “the district has spent $12,184 for catering during the board meetings over the past two and a half years.”

THE PURITAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT (more homophobia):

     An item on the January agenda for the SOCCCD meeting of the board included a recommendation that our colleges’ TV channels only broadcast programming—including student film and TV shows—with a PG rating. Evidently, the request had something to do with an earlier incident: trustee Nancy Padberg had noticed a broadcast of an award-winning student documentary about an older woman “coming out” and going on a cruise (“88 Years in the Closet”).
     Evidently, Saddleback College’s Channel 39 has broadcast programming within the less restrictive PG-13 standard, which the student documentary passed. It would not pass the PG standard.
     Naturally, the usual suspects in the affected programs came to the January board meeting to plead their case to leave the broadcast standard where it was—a change would mean that many student projects could not be broadcast. Further, Saddleback’s faculty senate leader, Bob Cosgrove, warned that this sort of censorship/micromanagement might have serious accreditation consequences.
     Nevertheless, the recommendation was pursued. In the end, officials for the relevant programs agreed to voluntarily limit broadcasts now to programming satisfying the PG standard.
     I tried to get readership riled about this, but—nothin’ doin. When the accreds finally arrived, I mentioned this event as an instance of board micromanagement. But I doubt that they heard me.

DID HE RESIGN? OR WAS HE FIRED?

     From the board room on January 25, I reported that “Mathur was out." I quoted the reading of board actions in closed session:
“In the closed session, the board approved an agreement with Dr. Mathur persuant to which Dr. Mathur’s service as the district chancellor shall end on June 30th, 2010, and provides for his retirement from the district effective June 30, 2011.”
     It was pretty obvious that Mathur had been forced out. He no longer had four trustee votes, especially after some fresh infamy (occurring some time earlier) at the expense of Don Wagner.
     But the district sold this thing as a decision by Mathur to retire—to spend more time with his family, etc.
     Naturally, I ignored that blather, and it was pretty clear that journalists, too, knew what was really going on. But the official word was that Mathur had decided to resign.
     Eventually, the always-stupid John Williams inadvertently spilled the beans. For a Register article, he was quoted as saying: “…You work for an elected board and you need a majority of those board members to vote to keep you. In this case, the majority of the board felt they wanted to have a change, so they voted to.”
     Gosh thanks John. You’re an idiot.
     I reported the fact that the district paid ethically-challenged GOP lawyer Phil Greer $25,000 to help Mathur to negotiate his exit. (He got a pretty sweet deal.)
     That’s pretty amazing, if you ask me. But few were amazed. Greer is also John Williams’ lawyer. He was Chriss Street’s lawyer. He's a typical friend o' Fuentes: corrupt, unethical, slimy. Don't it all make you proud?

WILL THE FIX BE IN?

     We ended the month of January with a post that asked: Will the fix be in—again? We were referring, of course, to the search for Mathur’s replacement. Eventually, Don offered strong assurances that the process would be clean. (In the end, despite a huge expense [a professional search firm was hired] and the efforts of a blue-ribbon committee, the board rejected all candidates and instead reached back for Gary Poertner, a safe [and probably excellent] choice.)
     Also at the end of January, I skimmed the cream from a New York Times piece about funny malapropisms and such. The examples mentioned were pretty damned funny. So here it is again:

SEVERAL LARGE BOWELS OF PASTA
     Yesterday, the NYT’s “Schott’s Vocab” zeroed in on malapropisms. Having been raised in an immigrant family, I own a brain that is hard-wired with dozens of malapropistic configuroons. I think I even got some of ‘em through the umbiblical “chord,” though, really, that’s a mute point at this stench in time.
     First, the malapropism upon which much of my parents’ fame rests:

“He died because of a blood cloth.”

     Sometimes, I will look right at them and say, “There is no such thing as a ‘blood cloth.’ You mean a ‘blood clot.’”
     Always, they look right back at me with immediate and utter incredulity.
     Here are some examples offered by Schott’s readers:


HE'S VERY EGOTESTICLE

• Someone I know is a genius at this. She spoke of a woman who had her hair up in a buffoon; saw my new shoes and said, "My, aren't you the fashion plague"; and recently spoke of a man who is very egotesticle.

• my favorite poem is "allergy in a church graveyard".

• My aunt always said, "I can't have anymore children because I've had my utopian tubes tied.”

• My father, noting the first hint of fall in the air, sighed and said: "Soon it will be time to fart stars in the fireplace.” [This seems to be something of a Spoonerism.]

• A busy woman: "Sometimes I get so stressed out I have to go to my room and decompose for an hour."

YOU DRIVE MY NUTS!

• A co-worker's little son announced that "you drive my nuts!" My daughter once wrote that our cat Butter Boy jumped on Frenzy when she was "least expectant." My grandfather deliberately invented examples like astosbestos for asbestos and nutneg for nutmeg. Another relative admired the singing of Ethel Murmur and the talents of Shirley Dimple. This becomes a way of life. It's dangerous to be exposed to it when young! [God, this sounds like my upbringing. Pretty whackitudinal!]

• i cannot decide which music i like better, R&B or flip flop

• "lead us snots into temptation...."

• My grandmother was famous for her malaprops; when asked if she would like to take a flight in her friend's new airplane, she gasped "Absolutely not, I like it right here on Terra Cotta";

• At a restaurant: Clams on the half shelf and a cup of chino.

• ". . . government takeover and mandation of healthcare . . ." --Sarah Palin

• Here are selected favorites from my wife:
1. This is the tip of the ice cube.
2. Security in schools has been tighter since 7-11.
3. The right foot doesn't know what the left foot is doing.
4. The swine flu has reached the pandemonium stage.

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TURTLE

• At work, our team had been working on a project that had been progressing at snail’s pace with no end remotely in sight. One day, we had a breakthrough, and one of my colleagues excitedly announced at our weekly meeting, “There’s light at the end of the turtle.”

• Our church secretary always refers to the annual report to the denomination as the Sadistical Report.

• A friend with a medical condition consulted a doctor at "Cedars Cyanide"

• "I am impressed by the enormity of the universe."

• I've been tracking these at work:
Someone who is frustrated: "I've been pulling my head out over this one!"
Working through a problem: "I'm just talking out loud here."
Suggesting something: "I don't mean to speak out of tongue, but..."
Rehashing: "I feel like I'm beating this with a dead horse."
Feeling a little disoriented: "At this point, we're running by the fly of our pants."
Is in a bad mood: "He's got a craw up his butt."

• "This is a bare-bones specification, let's flush out the details later".

• After a staff party at which pasta was served, we were reminded that several large bowels of pasta were left over in the refrigerator. None of us went near the fridge as a result.

HAD HIS KITCHEN FLOOR POLYURINATED

• A few years back my father, who is now nearing one hundred, proudly announced that he had recently had his kitchen floor polyurinated.

• The late Bruce King, governor of New Mexico for many years, was famous for having said of a legislative proposal that it would "open a whole box of Pandoras."

• One of my son's college roommates, an ROTC cadet, dropped out of the program just as the Iraq war was starting. "This is not a good time," he opined, "to be thinking about joining the Army corpse."

• "Be sure and put some of those neutrons on it." –While ordering a salad.

COULDA KNOCKED ME OVER WITH A FENDER

• "You could have knocked me over with a fender."

• "We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this country hostile or hold our allies hostile." –George W. Bush

• Explaining lethal injection: "First, they give 'em a needle to seduce 'em; then they give the legal injection"

• Friend referring to his relationship with his wife, "...like two ships that go bump in the night."

• "Those kids were able to Flea-Bargain their way to a lesser punishment."

P.S.: My ex and I, having had more than our share of exposure to my nutty family, have always enjoyed, and have been inspired by, endless malapropoidal Bauerific incorrectitude. To this day, when I speak with her, she'll note the "flaw in the ointment" or how the night is as "dark as a bat."

And then we'll just laugh like hell.

Dummy


My sister sent me this. Pretty funny.

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...