Wednesday, March 07, 2018

Another winter storm has hit the East. It is so cold, people are shaking like Sam Nunberg hearing pounding on his door.



If there was any justice, this latest winter Nor’easter would be called Stormy Daniels. But if there was any justice, Kobe Bryant would not have one more Oscar than Richard Burton. 



The man who tried to steal Francis McDormand’s Oscar, Terry Bryant, will be arraigned on felony grand theft. Apparently the inclusion rider does not include kleptomaniacs.  



Donald Trump’s top economic advisor, Gary Cohn, has resigned. In a related story, they have installed a revolving door in the front of the White House.



Donald Trump’s top economic advisor, Gary Cohn, has resigned and he is being sued by porn star, Stormy Daniels. This is not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, this is Capt. Smith announcing, “Don’t worry about that iceberg, we’re going to Hawaii.” 



Another huge snowstorm has hit much of the country. And in California, it got so cool, some people turned off their ceiling fans.



Rumor has it Donald Trump imposed the steel tariff in fury over another issue. That’s not like Trump to cover up a problem with something else. Oh, right. His hair.


Since you asked:


Like many people, I had good luck with teachers. Unfortunately, because teachers are so underpaid, the majority of teachers become teachers for all the right reasons. Although there were a few “teachers” who doing it for the job security, i.e. tenure, but mostly they were drivers education teachers and gym teachers.

My high school advisor, Morris Barfield, an Algebra teacher, was a living saint. He not only is responsible for my graduating from high school despite setting a record for under achieving that probably still stands. He also was such a good and kind human that he taught me anyone who would be racist against him was evil. 

When I had to pass a tough commodities math exam to get my commodities license as a broker, I promised myself I would call Mr. Barefield and thank him for all he did for me if I passed. 

I did and I did. 

To this day, I can remember Mr. Barefield choking up on the phone with gratitude. Besides telling my mom and dad how much I loved them when they were going through a rough time with my troubled brother, it was the best phone call I ever made.

And my creative writing teacher at the Harvard-of-the-South Bay, Cal. State Long Beach, Mr. Walthers, a certified hippy, taught me how fun writing could be with his boundless and infectious enthusiasm for both writing and reading. 

And I had the greatest harmonica teacher who ever lived, Paco Shipp. Paco turned an enthusiastic, but utterly unversed  in technique harmonica player into an actual - on rare occasions - professional harmonica player.  

But one of the biggest a-holes I have ever met was a professor of rhetoric at UCSB. He was an unmitigated sadistic egomaniac named Roland Quimby. 

Roland Quimby was too smart not to know what he was teaching, ancient rhetoric, was utterly useless, so he taught it to us out of spite with an ugly vengeance. And he had been at UCSB so long, his job was ironclad, no matter how much we students hated him.

And we hated him with a passion. 

With the mask of a gentle, bearded white-haired pipe-smoking professor, Roland Quimby cruelly tortured students with his impossibly rigid and punitive methods. If you did not parrot what he said, he gave you an F. 

Once he actually gave me an F Minus. Until that time, I had no idea F-minuses existed. 

One of the more useless things Quimby forced us to learn was an utterly bullshit rhetorical device which he alleged you could use to answer any question of any topic, no matter how complex, simply by a cheesy trick of rephrasing the question in a positive or negative way.  

On the opposite side of the humorless and useless Quimby is the awesome humorist, Calvin Trillen, who joked any question can be answered sufficiently to appear intelligent - despite the clear lack of knowledge -  with either, “It is too close to call,” or “It is too soon to tell.” 

Sarah Huckabee Sanders appears to be versed in both schools, but more in the Roland Quimby school of asshole rhetoric. 

Press: "Is it true respected economist, Gary Cohn, quit because Donald Trump ignored his advice not to put a tariff on steel?"

SHS: "Gary Cohn's resignation has specifically not anything to do with Donald Trump's tariff on steel."

Sarah doesn't even have to know or care to know who Gary Cohn is or what a steel tariff is. She just spews out a response to make Trump look good.

SHS answers any and all questions from the press with a useless rhetorical device of claiming Trump knowingly did the right thing no matter how stupid and awful the thing he actually did.

And Donald Trump once defended Nazis.