About Town

Brad Goins Friday, November 21, 2014 Comments Off on About Town
About Town

— Local charitable Christmas efforts are picking up steam. Among them is the annual Kiwanis Coats for Kids drive.

The Kiwanis ask that you contribute your used coats. They’ll be given to children living in families that are at or near the poverty level. There’s a need for as many coats as are contributed.

Donate your coats at AAA Cleaners, 622 E. Prien Lake Road or 2713 Country Club Road or at these schools:

Barbe, LaGrange, Iowa, Hamilton Christian Academy High Schools;

S.J. Welsh, Oak Park Middle Schools;

Moss Bluff, Prien Lake, Oak Park and Dolby Elementary Schools; and

St. John, Episcopal Day School, Immaculate Conception, Our Lady Queen of Heaven and St. Margaret Catholic Schools.

You can donate your coats through Nov. 20.

— The 1911 Historic City Hall continues its series of important contemporary art exhibits. This one features one of the real giants of modern and contemporary art: David Hockney.

In 1969, Hockney created 39 copper plate etchings to illustrate Grimms’ fairy tales. These simple, childlike, surreal images look quite a bit different from the colorful pop paintings of swimming pools and still lifes for which Hockney is famous.

I’m guessing these etchings are art that children will grasp and appreciate. The art may give children new perspectives on these traditional fairy tales.

“David Hockney: Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm” will run Nov. 7-Jan. 10 at the 1911 Historic City Hall.

 

Could You Use 750,000 Customers?

In its Oct. 9 edition, The Jambalaya News reported that “The JambalayaNews.com has recently partnered with LakeCharles.com. The combination of our print and web exposure allows your advertisement to potentially reach over 180,000 people per month.”

Over 180,000 people per month? In a parish with a total population of 200,000 (including babies, and such like)?

Well, hell, yes. Just let me share with you the numbers I’m getting from my new combination of print and web exposure.

Since I’ve partnered with WagonRut.com, your advertisement with Up Front Prestige International (UFPI) has the potential to reach over 750,000 people per day.

And since I’ve partnered with Snake’sBelly.com, your advertisement with UFPI has the potential to reach over 4,200,000 million people in an hour and a half.

And finally, now that I’ve completed my partnerships with treytreysmudliciousmudbogging.com and muddyhoneys.com, your advertisement with UFPI has the potential to reach over 5 billion people in three seconds. Even if you don’t reach 5 billion people, I personally guarantee you that you will reach 4 billion. You have my word.

 

Beware The Gypsy Razor Kings!

When the power figures in an area that’s rife with racism pretend there is no racism, there are bound to be awkward moments when a bumbling government bureaucrat gives utterance one of the racist thoughts that course through his head all day.

One of these occurred in October, when The Independent magazine in Lafayette sponsored a luncheon titled “Women Who Mean Business.” At that event, reported Lafayette TV station KATC, the superintendent of Lafayette Parish Schools Pat Cooper “suggested” that a “black mafia” in Lafayette influences the way African-Americans vote in parish school board elections.

A black mafia? In Lafayette? That sounds about as insidious as the Aleut Bandit Counts who wreaked such havoc in the latest election cycle in Wagon Rut.

A number of people who were a little muffed about Cooper’s remarks held a press conference on Oct. 17. One of them was former Lafayette Councilman Chris Williams, who said, “We ask that [Cooper] … issue an apology … to the children that he serves and represents … I don’t know who he’s referring to, nor do I care who he was referring to. The comment … was derogatory. It’s unacceptable for Lafayette Parish and for Southwest Louisiana and we ought to be having a superintendent that’s worried about the children.”

Well, it seems pretty likely to me that Cooper wasn’t thinking about any children when he crammed his foot into his mouth. He was thinking about politics. That’s one of the problems of having bureaucrats — and not teachers — run education. Some superintendents are all about education, but others know as much about teaching and learning as I know about gyrating electrons and plasma arcs.

Just for the record, Williams explained what some black people in Lafayette do come election time: “they do whatever it takes to get people to go out and vote. But for anyone to infer that vote-buying or anything like that is going on is just ridiculous.”

In addition to sounding racist, Cooper’s remarks also sounded like sour grapes. It’s as if he was saying, “Black folks don’t support me.” Dude, let me give you a free tip. If you want to get some black support, refrain from saying racist stuff.

 

Our Very Candy Is At Stake!

You don’t have to be a media analyst or sociology professor to know that the U.S. has been going through an Ebola panic. But at least one media venue was able to put things in perspective and focus on the top priorities.

That was The Times-Picayune, which recently ran a lead paragraph that read “Fears over Ebola in West Africa — where most of the world’s cocoa crops are grown — is creating uncertainty in the global chocolate market.”

The Times-Picayune was actually reporting on a National Public Radio story. NPR reported that the price for cocoa had just spiked, and that “fears are centered on whether Ebola” could move from such chocolate-rich countries as Liberia and Guinea to such chocolate-rich countries as Ivory Coast and Ghana.

The World Cocoa Foundation, which gets money from Nestle, Hershey and Mars, donated $600,000 to anti-Ebola efforts. Yeah, $600,000 ought to do it. I sure hope it does. The last thing we need is a $1.50 candy bar. That would be really, really bad. And scary.

 

Let’s Take The Humor To The Next Level

Most of you probably think that when the Heaven’s Gate people put on their fancy athletic shoes and committed mass suicide in the 1990s, that was the end of Heaven’s Gate.

Not so! Turns out there are still at least a few Heaven’s Gate people around, and they’ve been maintaining the Heaven’s Gate website as long as there’s been a Heaven’s Gate website.

Let me get you up to speed on what’s happened in the years since the mass suicide. First of all, Hale-Bopp has arrived. Thank goodness for that. “Whether Hale-Bopp has a ‘companion’ … is irrelevant …” states the site. I agree. But the reason for putting “companion” in quotation marks is relevant.

Now, because Hale-Bopp has arrived, the spacecraft from the “Level Above Human” is about to arrive. I assume that much, at least, is clear.

And there’s more. Providing the keys to Heaven’s Gate in 2014 are “Ti and Do (The UFO Two).”

One item — an article titled “Our Position Against Suicide” — may be a new entry to the site. If I read the section “Overview of Present Mission” correctly, the earlier suicide of the Heaven’s Gate crew was a “classroom experience.” Also. you’ll want to know that the “Next Level” is, apparently, protecting those Heaven’s Gaters who are still around.

After reading two pages of this stuff, I came to this jaw-dropping sentence: “This is a bit of what we would call Next Level Humor.” Humor? I could have sworn I missed it. These people aren’t really trying to be funny, are they? If they are, they might want to lead off with something like, “Hey, did you hear the one about the UFO Two who were late for their Level Above Human classroom experience?” I’m already laughing.

One thing nobody can deny — the really interesting people in this world are just nuts about capital letters.

Based on the materials on the site, it sounds like the remaining Heaven’s Gaters have again sold all their possessions and are now awaiting the “second rapture,” which will be followed by “the end of the seventh involvement,” “phase one” and the “accelerated version of the metamorphic classroom.” OK, now that I understand.

All over the site, the theme of the “recycling of the world” runs as an undercurrent. A statement by “Jwnody — a student” reads: “It is time for civilization to be recycled — ‘spaded under.’” Well, finally there’s something we can agree on.

These people must be sincere. They’ll send you all the videos you want free of charge. But the Heaven’s Gate Book — that’ll set you back $45. Must be a good read.

You very well may not want to know more about this. But if you do, the place to go is wave.net/upg/gate/.

 

Best Conspiracy Theory EVER!

The following passages are taken from Jack Olsen’s book Salt of the Earth (St. Martin’s Paperback edition, 1997, pages 329 and 367):

“He orated for hours about ‘the network,’ an evil organization drawn from the Lutheran Church, the ‘Aryan Church,’ the Gere Family, the Boy Scouts of American, lawyers and public officials. His letters showed [the] relationships [between] the death of an Everett [Wash.] woman in a SWAT raid, a recent string of arson fires, the Vietnam War, the Patty Hearst case, certain cabalistic happenings in the woods of Idaho and Rhode Island, the CIA and the FBI, the publication of a Dear Santa letter by a destitute child in western Washington, the latest University of Washington football scandals, the Food and Drug Administration and other items …”

“[He wasted] reams of paper with diatribes against ‘The Family,’ which now included the Lutheran Network, the Aryan Church, Puget Power [the electric company], the state Department of Wildlife, the Supreme Court, Mikey and Joey Gere, Mother Teresa, the author of this book and other forces of evil.”

Hey, what gives? The guy never mentioned me once. But I was plotting against him the whole time. Just goes to show that just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean you know who’s really against you.

 

Apparently Not

E! Network Twitter from Oct. 20: “Kris Jenner on reports Bruce is dating her friend: ‘I don’t know who he’s dating.’ Thoughts?”

 

Joke

Somebody told me you sound like an owl.

Who?

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