- Words of something-way-other-than-wisdom in the Colchester High School commencement address: “A penis is a vagina on steroids.” Leading to the follow-up question, American Flatbread Founder George Schenk is a commencement speaker on…? (Note: In my limited experience, George seems like a really good guy but… oy… how exactly are his women employees supposed to feel after hearing this? Hopefully there’s more to the story… some sort of context, although it’s hard to imagine.)
- VT Commons blogger Simha Bode has apparently made the discovery of the millennium, as he’s discovered nuclear fusion reactors (here and here). Somebody should call the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and tell them to stop wasting their time and money.
- According to John McLaughrey and VT Tiger’s Geoffrey Norman, Senator Sanders’ blasting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for cozying up with Entergy, enlisting the Department of Justice to intervene on the corporations behalf, and being completely opaque in its deliberations is (wait for it)… great news for Vermont Yankee! Wow. I’d have thought it could create more problems for them! Good thing we have experts to save us from the nakedly obvious.
- Did you know that someone had tried to resuurect the ol’ “Welch Watch” website from ages past? Me neither. He started it in January, and didn’t get out of January. He also threw up (heh) a facebook companion page, which made it a bit longer – there are entries as recently as March. It’s a St. Michael’s megadittoer student named Dan Bower, who also started the far-right FB group Right On Gallows, which talks up the wild-eyed right line for Chittenden County and eastern Virgina (like he’s the anti-kestrel?), and does something called the “Vermont Avenger Show” (which follows his previous “Fail and Live Long” radio show), and is also part of the Green Mountain Patriots, a local tea party “organization” (koff)… well, at that point I got bored. Some serious conservative-attention-deficit-disorder, here.
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I, too, have only limited experience of George; and he does seem like a really good guy. It is a shame that we are not to hear the context of his statement, because I have no idea what he was getting at, and can only guess that he was probably sort of winging it from hand-written notes that may have sort of gotten away from him.
This is what happened when he very kindly agreed to come and speak on behalf of the NWCRG several years ago at an event we were holding in St. Albans. After a sporadic correspondence about the event, his replies written in pencil and delivered by snail mail (he doesn’t do e-mail), he made time in his schedule to come out and be our keynote speaker. The soul of generosity, he showed up early and proceeded to help bake flatbreads for our guests before stepping up to the podium with his handwritten notes that fluttered away from him shortly thereafter. He spoke with passion about the significance of local food, but I didn’t have the impression that he was completely relaxed at a microphone or completely in control of the words he spoke. Some people sort of come unglued in front of an audience.
I find it difficult to believe that he was being intentionally crude or misogynistic. It is much easier for me to guess that his desire to engage the audience kind of went off the rails, after which there was no going back.
Honestly?…though it’s no excuse…it isn’t as if the kids don’t hear and say much worse on a more or less daily basis.