Author: Dick

Some guy was substituting for Joe Paggs on the Joe Paggs show this a.m. at Houston’s KTRH-AM talk station. Where do you get substitutes for a talk show host for someone whom no one has heard of anyway? But this guy asked the question of those in talk show land: Was TV coverage of Tim Russert’s passing Friday overblown this weekend?

It occurred to me that if the substitute host was all bent out of shape about too much coverage then why was he giving the story even more media coverage? Not so sharp, some people.

Yes, there probably was too much coverage concerning the passing of this important media figure. But you have to fill up that 24-hour news hole somehow don’t you?

“The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne.” — Randy Newman, “Louisiana 1927”

It seems as if Ma Nature is trying to wash away the U.S. Midwest. One can hardly stop thinking about flood songs while conjuring up visions of large corn pasture chunks and farm homes floating down river toward places like Plaquemines and Evangeline: “Louisiana, Louisiana/They’re trying to wash us away” and “How high’s the water Mama? Five feet high and rising.”

The electronic media seems fixated on trying to tie the flooding and large number of tornadoes this year to global warming. The right, of course, is ridiculing the media as usual while still others try a more thoughtful approach in making their case against The Big Heater as the villain.

Me? I am somewhere in the middle because my degree was not in climatology or meteorology or one of those other “-ologies.” As some talking weatherhead was saying yesterday on TV, the biggest factor with an unusual number of tornadoes and severe flooding this year has more to do with geography and the ever-present battle of hot air versus cold air. Some like it hot … Could global warming be to blame for what the fellow in the linked article above describes as a continual deluge of 100-year floods? Maybe, maybe not.

Global warming is the 20 and 21st centuries’ “Flat Earth” dispute. And it will not matter whether our spherical planet melts every iota of ice away some day, there will likely still be someone around like “Flat Earth Society” proponents who will believe global warming is a scam, myth or both.

But the speculation of media types each time some sort of rash weather takes place that global warming may be in play does little other than fill a news hole with something a little different than saying the same trite words or showing the same cliche video. Without people who — unlike me — know what the hell they are talking about to offer some perspective or analysis as to whether weird weather is actually abnormal or just cyclical, then wheels will just be continually spun and we advance no more in our understanding than we had before the tape rolled or the words were written.

Dadgum, that is one long sentence! And everything here I have typed out while my arthritic neck shoots out little shocks of pain is much longer than I had planned. But there is little I can do about it now. The water’s rising. It’s time to flee!

With this being the season for graduations, I look back wistfully at my own college commencement exercises at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, (Mascot: Lumberjacks)in May 1984 where the late U.S. Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, asked the assembled crowd what was to be a haunting rhetorical question for the ages: “Where are my trousers?”

No, actually I don’t even remember what Tower said that morning. I think he said something about Communism and indicated that it was bad. But I figure if that was really what he said and I actually got the context of his message right then he did much better at imparting knowledge than more than a couple of my professors.

Comedian Don Novello, known for his portrayal as Father Guido Sarducci during the golden era of Saturday Night Live, has a well-known comedy routine known as “The Five-Minute University” with his comedic thesis being that everything one learned in college can be reduced to five minutes. (Example: Economics? Supply and Demand.)

Fr. Sarducci’s hyperbolic observations aside, certain members of the human race do indeed expect much to come out of much more when there really is much less. “By God, your A) Mother & Dad B) Government C)Prison System (Pick one) is/are paying tens of thousands of dollars/Euros/pesos to put you through four years of college (or more)and so you are expected to give us four years (or more) of knowledge.”

Right. Like you really would want to listen to someone who absorbed every single word spoken to them by some windbag professor or gleaned from some august text sold for $56.50 retail at the university center bookstore and can be resold at the end of the semester for $1.62.

One must never forget, however, that a higher education is more than a sum of its parts. It is part of the sum. Or some of the part. Or something.

So as I rapidly dissemble as a means of escaping that which one might mistake for meaning, I bid you a good day and a bright future grads and future grads as well, both young and old. You deserve it. Remember to always brush after each meal. Walk facing traffic and not directly in front of it. And please remember, all aspirins are alike.

Were it not for the fact that sky-high gasoline prices are aggravating, then hearing the varying explanation and/or justification each day would be a laugh riot.

It would seem the price of oil would be a simple enough culprit for analysts to blame but the reasoning for why gasoline is at $4.009 per gallon goes way beyond any reason if you are to believe half the people interviewed in the news. And, just by the way, I don’t believe about half or more of what I hear about the rationalization for higher gasoline.

I have to give my local daily newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise, credit for this article. They just quote those who are being affected by the steep prices rather than to let us cut through all the caca de vaca as to why the cost is so high.

What is really sad — especially of those who live on the Gulf Coast — is that we will have to worry both about hurricanes striking us this summer as well as the even greater gas spikes the storms inevitably will bring if a hurricane approaches even 5,000 miles away from an offshore drilling rig.

So what or who is really behind the gasoline prices besides the high cost of oil, speculators, excessive demand and short refining capacity? Here are a few of my guesses:

***Bill and Hillary Clinton, at least that is what the GOPs will claim along with blaming our black Irish presumptive Dem nominee Barack O’Bama.

***MobileExxon

***The Hair Club for Men

***Global Warming

***The Sicilians

***Godzilla

***El Nino

***La Nina

***Iran

***Iraq

***The Late Saddam Hussein

***Flipper

***Britney Spears

***Charlie Sheen

***Spam (Hormel)

***Spam (Computer)

***Gallagher

***Noxema

***Free Willy

And we could go on and on from here. Make up your own list. And feel free to put your name and mine up there. There is plenty of blame to go around, at least if you listen to the experts. It is enough to give one gas.

WebMD notes today that “Samonella Tomato Warning Expanded.” In addition to that being interesting if not disturbing news if you eat tomatoes, the headline would, as Dave Barry might point out, be a great name for a rock band. “Tainted Tomatoes,” part of another WebMD hed also would be a good rock band name.

Bizarre band names have become so commonplace that no one, except maybe Dave Barry, muses over them these days. I thought about that yesterday watching some documentary about Bellingham, Washington’s own Death Cab for Cutie. (I am typing this in the public library so if a blank appears before Cab it will mean the computer’s nanny censoring system has just kept that bad old word from appearing that means that state which is the opposite of life. Get it? If that word appears never mind!)

Now I don’t know very much about Cutie’s Cab other than via this explanation on Wikipedia which says the band takes its name from a song on a 1967 album by Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, which is a right interesting name in its self. But at least this explanation appears to indicate some type of meaning behind the name where some bands in days past apparently lacked meaning such as Strawberry Alarm Clock but not so as with Captain Beefhart.

Oh well, it is just good to know I can sit here at the computer in the library and completely waste an hour thinking about our wonderful culture. Kudos to Cutie for an intriguing name.