Category: Sardonic Side

So, which makes less sense? Having a pet python or buying a dead-on, gun-shaped cigarette lighter? Just askin’.

• Why is there a market for dead-on, gun-shaped cigarette lighters?
• Why would anyone want a pet python?
• Why would anyone license anyone (who’s not a herpetologist) to have a pet python?
• Why wouldn’t you permit electric-cart shuttles in amenity-challenged, taxi-shunning, downtown Tampa?
• Why, during turbulent economic times, wouldn’t a “Benevolent Association” recommend that its (Police) members accept a pay-raise freeze to help save the jobs of fellow city workers?
• Why does Kevin White keep getting elected?
• Why does it take a swine-flu scare to prompt the school board to do away with the educationally-indefensible policy of attendance-based exam exemptions?
• Why would a high-caliber surgeon want a souvenir bullet?
• Why would you quibble about Derek Jeter’s variance addition of two additional fence feet once you’ve established the reality of the largest home in the county (33,000 square feet) being shoe-horned into a residential neighborhood on Davis Islands?
• Why wouldn’t parents of Casey Turner’s St. Pete fifth-graders feel creeped out that their kids’ 41-year-old “hip-hop redneck” teacher hosts bikini contests at a local bar and recently participated in CBS’ insipidly suggestive and obnoxious reality show, “Big Brother”?
• Why wouldn’t a state (for example, this one) ban texting while driving?
• Why would anyone listen to what the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement has to say about anything, including the sidewalk privatizing at downtown St. Petersburg’s BayWalk?
• Why do otherwise responsible, intelligent conservatives not see through the shallow sham that is Sarah Palin?
• Why is it that tort reform isn’t a bigger factor (than, say, the specious euthanasia or socialism scenarios) in the fractious, health-care-reform debate?
• Why would anyone doubt that the only relevant criterion in Philadelphia for judging the loathsome, arrogant, obviously well-scripted Michael Vick is how the Eagles do this year?
• Why don’t we focus more on all those prominent people who never needed a second chance because they never hurt anyone or anything in the first place?
• Why bother putting a morals clause into a contract that includes “willful conduct that could objectively be determined to bring public disrepute or scandal” if you’re not going to apply it to the sleazy conduct of University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino?
• Why would anyone read — let alone buy — the biography “Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World”?
• Why do so many yahoos have to “channel” the Founding Fathers to make the case about the right to buy assault weapons?
• Why should the U.S., despite improved technology, even consider following the lead of Europe and lift the ban on in-flight cellphone calls — unless lawmakers and regulators actually want to add to the level of flying stress by imposing chronically inane cellphone conversations on captive audiences?
• Why wouldn’t even New York Yankee fans be embarrassed by their Pinstripers, who could spend more the half a billion dollars on free agents this year but can’t ante up $42,000 for the standard Tampa Water Department fee for installing a bigger meter at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa?
• Why does Mary Mulhern get grief for tapping into her city council discretionary fund to partly pay for her visit to Cuba in hopes of better positioning Tampa for inevitable trade opportunities, when a similar amount, if allocated for, say, an out-of-town “Best Municipal Practices For Recessionary Times” convention would not have drawn such scrutiny?  
• Why are those “Welcome to Tampa/City of Champions” signs still up when it’s been, well, a while and there’s not even an Arena Football League anymore?
• Why would anyone entertain real hopes of USF’s football team finally finishing strong and winning big, pressure-packed Big East games down the stretch when Jim Leavitt, hardly the avatar of sideline decorum and play-calling composure, is still head coach?
• Why would the International Olympic Committee back any sport (golf most recently) that doesn’t consider the Olympics as its ultimate forum and quintessential competition?
• Why don’t more people, notably in the service sector, respond to “thank you” with “you’re welcome” – and not “no problem”? — unless, of course, there had been something problematic about doing their job.

Couldn’t agree more with those who say “enough” about President Obama and his Hawaiian certificate of live birth. And “enough” of the fringe GOPsters who give “conspiracy nut” a bad name. It’s scurrilous sour grapes. Not even Barry Goldwater’s birth in (the territory of) Arizona grew legs like this. So, “enough” on the subject of Obama’s birth certificate.

 

Unless, of course, you want to make something of a mother with the first name of “Stanley.”

Too bad neither William Jennings Bryan nor Clarence Darrow was available. Their presence at the recent “Controversial Issues in the Science Classroom” workshop at USF would have underscored how far we haven’t come when it comes to evolution.

 

Indeed, evolution was prominent on the agenda. One speaker, archaeologist Debra Walker, A Monroe County School Board member, soberly noted that she “was shocked at how many districts just totally ignored evolution.”

 

Actually, it’s arguably not so shocking – given that for the past two years the Florida Legislature considered bills challenging the validity of evolution. No wonder. According to the Pew Research Center, less than a third of the public now agrees with the proposition that life – including the human variety – has been evolving.

 

Then, again, it’s only been 83 years since the Scopes trial. Evolution obviously takes a while.

Wimbledon’t: Did Serena Williams think she was on radio? After her victory over sister Venus in the Women’s Wimbledon final, Serena met the media as per custom.

 

Now, Serena has been known to make a fashion statement or two over the course of a career that includes 11 major championships, but what was with that T-shirt? The one that said: “Are You Looking At My Titles?” Or was that the full-figured Serena’s way of saying that she and the media, which at times have been less than fawning, are now bosom buddies?

It’s not Hernando’s hide-away any more. The times have apparently caught up.

 

The Brooksville City Council recently voted to approve an updated city dress code that, among other directives, requires employees to wear underwear and use deodorant. You read that right.

 

By way of explanation, Brooksville Mayor Joe Bernadini offered this rationale: “There are those who have to be told.”

 

You can’t make this stuff up.

So, Atlanta rapper T.I., who was born with the much more prosaic handle of Clifford Harris Jr., is off on his latest marketing tour. Perhaps you missed it.

 

Well, this one is for more “street cred,” as they say in concentric rap circles. This one is to the federal prison in Arkansas to serve a year and change on a weapons conviction.

 

Apparently the slammer is where rappers go to get their aforementioned “street cred.” And for the record, Talent Imposter – or whatever the hell T.I. stands for – was arrested for trying to buy, among other less-than-standard household items, machine guns and silencers. Indeed, who could be remotely credible without at least packing some semi-automatic heat?

 

Apparently Threatening Intimidation’s rap lyrics, as odious as they are, were not, in and of themselves, a sufficient guarantee of  “street cred.” He still lacked authentic thug bona fides; he still needed, well, a rap sheet. And the only way to earn one was via a complementary stretch in stir.

 

And courtesy of Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, here’s a sampling of some vilely vintage Trash Infusion lyrics:

 

“We know where yo’ family live/ Trust me you don’t want me up

in yo’ crib/ Wit a ski mask on duct taping your kids/ You can pray

all you want/ But I don’t forgive.”

 

This is a prime example of why so much rap has been labeled – ok, by me – “the anthem of a dysfunctional culture.” It is Barack Obama’s and Bill Cosby’s ultimate bete noire and a cultural and security nightmare to all those who think misogynistic, homicidal nihilism is more than another show-biz niche.

 

But this is what’s out there – under the guise of “keeping it real.”  And this one example, however realistically despicable its theme, is relatively sanitized. This is, after all, a respectable newspaper.

 

At the risk of outing myself as the quintessential philistine but with new-found appreciation for Jackson Pollock’s drippy canvases, I say, yet again, this is not art nor its practitioners artists. Moreover, Truculence Incarnate and other “rap artists” are merely oxymoronic examples of what you can do with a rhyming dictionary, an anarchistic attitude, no meaningful job skills and a gullible marketplace not yet sated by cultural chaff passing for societal wheat.

 

This couldn’t have been what Adam Smith had in mind. But it will take a less enabling, more discerning, less politically correct market – along with the propriety pulpit of the first African-American president – to excise this cultural cancer.  

 

 

 

Talk about a jolt.

 

I’ve just been informed that my eighth grade graduating class – St. Timothy’s Catholic School in the Northeast section of Philadelphia – will be gathering, at least in disparate parts, for a reunion. A 50^th reunion.

 

Instant reverie of a half century ago.

 

To be sure, the Eisenhower Administration was holding up its end of the Cold War contretemps, and Fidel Castro had just toppled the Batista government in Cuba. And Hawaii would become the 50^th state. On balance, we thought Jerry Lee Lewis was a lot more relevant.

 

At a much more parochial level, 1959 was also the year that Catholic school students were all properly apprised that Pope John XXIII was calling the first Ecumenical Council in nearly 100 years. We thought that was about as much fun as watching Milton Berle with our parents.

 

Personally, I was more concerned with an eighth grade crush on Eleanor Verdi, a spring sortie to West Philadelphia to get on Bandstand, the cool movie that was “Ben Hur” and the better-than-average prospects of the Eagles that year. The Phillies still stunk.

 

The reunion letter — who tipped them off? — referenced our graduating class of more than 180. We were divided into three sections, where the same nun taught the same 60-plus students everything – from religion to math – in the same classroom.

 

Imagine, 60-plus students per class. Boys on one side, girls on the other. Now is that not, Florida Class Size Amendment advocates, the teacher-to-student ratio from hell?  

 

But somehow, we learned. We didn’t know how pedagogically put-upon we were and how uncool it was to have to wear school ties and uniforms. What about fashion and our need to express our individuality?

 

We read a lot, wrote a lot, memorized a lot and homeworked a lot. We thought self esteem was something to be earned — not a separate curriculum.

 

Discipline was meted out summarily by the nuns. Most of the ones I had didn’t look like the answer to a central casting call for petite and pious looking extras for “The Song of Bernadette” or “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima.” They mostly looked like they could have gone three rounds with Jake LaMotta.

 

Corporal punishment was administered to the usual class clowns – but the distraction to the rest of the class was minimal. That’s because the nuns had the ultimate leverage – your parents. They were all on the same side, and there was no copping a plea at home.

 

It was the Napoleonic Code. If the nun — and mine was Sister Charles Mary in eighth grade — said you were guilty of acting like a smart aleck, then you were. In fact, your parents — and back then they always came in pairs — had also seen that side of you.

There are a lot of folks who think a playoff system is the best way to determine a national champion in major college football. Among them: the president of the United States. When he’s not caught up in priorities that range from economic stimulus and military decisions to health care overhaul, energy independence and educational reform, he can also be a fan. It’s probably therapeutic.

 

That said, what in the world is Congress (specifically the House Energy and Commerce Committee) doing by holding a hearing on a college football playoff?  Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas has actually introduced legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a game a national championship unless it’s the product of a playoff.

 

Moreover, Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch has put the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) on the agenda for the Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee this year.

 

Speaking of agendas, this has everything to do with the Universities of Texas and Utah not making it into this year’s national championship game, the one where Florida defeated Oklahoma.

 

Let ESPN and sports bar patrons debate it. Is this Congress or the Colbert Report?

The latest incarnation of what was once the Amphitheater nightclub in Ybor City will be opening later this month. Changing demographics and music tastes kept taking their toll. Soon Amphitheater will have officially morphed into Club Tantra.

            The good news – at least for a lot of neighboring businesses – is that hip hop is out.

            Possibly even better news: Naked sushi models are in.

            You can’t make this stuff up.