Comma Correction Followed by Board Meeting

From: Anonymous [noreply-comment@blogger.com]

Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2008 3:42 AM

To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Just One More Sexist Twit.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Just One More Sexist Twit":

"Appeal that position to God, the Father, who’s something of a domestic tyrant on his bad days"

If you are distinguishing God the Father from God the Son or God the Holy Spirit, "the Father" is restrictive.

Publish this comment.

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Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 12:41 AM

Now this shows the erudition of my readers. They know a lot more than I do. My excuse is that I did not recall that God has three personae. I thought of Him as the the one boffo fellow in charge of everything. If I were smart enough to know the nitty gritty of religious doctrine, I would be guilty of a comma error. But since I am shaky on the Yahweh personae, you have to give me a pass on this one. lee

Copy to all board members

The Thursday board meeting was two in one. The budget was on review.

The two issues I spoke to were the board-travel “philosophy” statement and the Elia hiring and job-creation practices.

I understand that the “philosophy” statement is on the Web, but I can’t find it. I suspect when I do track it down that I will discover confirmed that my intuition that the board is trying to sneak unsavory practices past the public with exalted diction.

My assumption is that this “philosophy” travelgate statement does not explore the love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-sacrifice. My guess is that it explores ways to weasel out of blowing a pile of citizen cash on travel to fun places, ignoring the fact that thousands of poor children in Hillsborough County can’t afford the supplies to participate in class projects and that that the pile of money the board members blew on their shallow travelgate diversion would have equipped a lot of these poor children with the supplies they need and won’t have unless teachers buy the supplies for them as is often the case despite teachers’ meager salaries. God forbid that an exalted board member demonstrate any care for the children in the board’s charge by donating personal travel money to student supplies. Let the poor students eat cake is board attitude.

The board is incapable of pursuing anything by intellectual means; ditto for moral self-sacrifice from the habitués of Las Vegas and Alaska on the public dime.

Ms. Griffin said during the discussion on the “philosophy” of its members’ travel that she didn’t want to get “too technical and bureaucratic” in limning the board’s travel philosophy. I believe Ms. Olson echoed this sentiment.

Any outfit that shows as little restraint as the board in collecting boarding passes needs all the bureaucratic talent available to put down in black in white and in minute detail that its members can’t frolic on public money. With a gang of such profligates, it is well to detail what they can and can’t do in the most minute manner. Subtlety is not the current board’s long suit.

These board peripatetics don’t seem able to see reasonable restraint as necessary in spending travel money from the public kitty, so the reservations to their abandoned travel impulses should be detailed in the plainest one-syllable English terms and with sufficient specificity so that board Bedouins can’t wiggle out of the guidelines.

I addressed the issue by saying that a thousand bucks was the most the board members should get for travel. I said that was sufficient to take them to the yearly nation-wide board hoedown in California, where the protocols of room service are what attendees memorize. They don’t bring back from these powwows anything that enhances their board ability.

I said that if the board members wanted to go out to Oregon to talk to the state officials of secondary schools about the way they could get a federal government –paid foreign language program going district- wide in the schools, that would be an acceptable use of extra travel money. Oregon’s students are learning Arabic. I recommended Chinese for those of Hillsborough County inasmuch as the Chinese are revving up to clean our clocks economically so that our children and grandchildren need to be able to talk to these people.

I said another worthy use of citizen money would be to go to some of those schools that had adopted the Spring program and talk to the people who used it so as to assess what the county teachers and students would be in for when Ms. Elia’s stealth gimcrack purchase took effect. If you recall, nobody knew about the Spring purchase save Ms. Elia, not even the board members; evidence of that fact was April Griffin’s inane suggestion to have a workshop for teachers after the Elia buy of Spring was a done deal, the tardy news of which caused the teacher to raise a ruckus about not being consulted.

The which reminds me to mention Chair Falliera’s being nicer to me than she used to be when she interrupted me every other sentence to question the relevance of my remarks. I am afraid I then riposted with sarcasm. But Falliera’s interruptions have disappeared. I suspect it’s because I survived her plot with the Jolly Green Giant of the Security Squad to kick me out of a board meeting and lived to detail her ROSSAC adultery with Marc Hart, her break-up of his marriage, her making miserable his two young children, and my handing the information out at the door of the last Tiger Bay meeting.

Some of you may have read in La Gaceta that the Tiger Bay poltroons made up a lie to keep me from attending the school-board candidate review. They had kicked me out of the club for being too hard on elective-office candidates in my questions and for constantly standing up for women’s rights at the slightest whiff of an insult to the sisterhood. This is the price you pay for sticking up for what’s right. You become unpopular with cowards.

I also cited the Orange Park science teacher struggling to teach students evolution despite the resistance of the state’s plethora of right-wing ignorant toward science and suggested board members travel to some of the conferences held round the state on evolution to learn more about it. I said they should prepare themselves by reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man. Fat chance. That reading assignment has as much chance of being fulfilled as that when I told my students to read Hamlet. Until The National Inquirer publishes The Origin of the Species between exclusives on John Edwards' love child and Sarah Palin’s lies about selling the governor’s plane on EBay, board members will not venture into evolution unexpurgated.

Before I rose to comment on the criminal employment practices of the board, Mr. Klutho, the guy who calls the board such vivid names, approached me to say he was not enamored of me (he had apparently read my blog and had taken some satire literally) and that, furthermore, I would never be in his exalted class no matter how hard I tried.

If Mr. Klutho’s hygiene and dental integrity were better, I might have grieved this loss. But the poor man needs some way to vent his spleen at somebody since the board members were in no mood that night to allow him to stand at the podium and call them idiots for three minutes. Ms. Falliero gaveled him down, and he exploded into a terminal outpouring of epithets before the guard came and escorted him from the podium.

The trick in addressing the board is to couch your insults in sesquipedalian terms that fly over the board’s head. If you want a crash course in impeccably proper insults, watch “Prime Minister’s Question Time.” Nobody refines insults into sanitary proper language like the English do.

One strategy is to retreat into medical terms for bodily functions when you want to invoke them in remarks to the board. In NYC, we used to live a few doors down from a doctor whose wife and I traded babysitting chores. This family had taught its children to use medical terms for personal activities. Hence, the youngest, a tot of 3 and a half would pull on my skirt and say, “Leo’s mommie, I have to micturate.”

I speculated about the dazzling verbal future of this child when he grew old enough to become member of a street gang. His epithets would be something like, “OK, defecation head, get ready to have your words shoved down your micturating throat!” Such linguistic talents would take him far both on the street and also later at Harvard.

When I rose to speak about the vile employment practices of the board, I first objected to Ms. Falliera about her gaveling down Mr. Klutho because, in so doing, she violated his Constitutional rights.

I said that the First Amendment did not require citizens to use bland diction when addressing public officials. The board has a fetish about potty language. Its members will let any outrage by a citizen go unchecked if it does not contain “vulgar” language, the poetry of bathroom stalls. The board’s philosophical reach is restricted, but it has a firm grasp of potty language from Sunday school graduate courses in the subject.

I first lamented the departure of the last Ph.D. in the administration with his replacement’s not being one. I think Ms. Elia wants no one in the administration whose degree tops hers. Next she may go to high-school dropouts to establish her superiority. The hiring of Kipley’s degreeless husband over people with degrees and experience called for in the job description is an omen.

Dr. What’s His Name’s replacement is a woman named “Wye” if I am not mistaken. She got the job sans advertising. I suspect she got it for her fluent sycophancy in dealing with La Elia. I will know her particulars when I pick up her resume from Public Affairs, for which I am paying $14.50 for a copy of the whole resume because I neglected to cite the pages I wanted.

I pray Wye is not another early-childhood scholar or, God forbid, another Kipley home-ec savant. I sat close to this new administrator and noted her taste for gaudy strappy spikes when she got up for some reason. Maybe her Las Vegas shoe wardrobe will make up for any academic deficiencies she suffers.

After lamenting the lack of equal opportunity in Ms. Wye’s hiring, I plodded on to the disgusting story of Dr. Hamilton’s employment history in the school system. Dr. Hamilton fed at the school-system public trough for 30 or so years before retiring without being able to distinguish between the homophones “your” and “you’re.”

Hamilton was supposed to retire at the beginning of ’08 but had the fantods at the thought of leaving the site of his glory—the killing ROSSAC fields, where he had lorded it over every person inferior to his high rank. He was one of the three most salient torturers of Mr. Erwin, the other two being Jack Davis and Dr. Earl the Pearl Lennard.

Speaking of Mr. Davis, I hear he has fallen into some kind of contretemps with La Elia and has decided to flee the premises into retirement, knowing as he well does from being one of the high-level Erwin torturers the forlorn status of people who fall into the superintendent’s bad graces.

I mentioned that I hoped the board would ratify the “equal employment opportunity” it stamps on everything by instructing the superintendent to advertise the Davis job widely to get a PH.D. with a bona fide degree and experience in technology contrary to Mr. Davis’s having an early-childhood degree and not one technology credit. I think Davis got that job as a reward for his participation in the torture of Erwin after the court awarded Mr. Erwin a settlement for ROSSAC’s ensemble breaking of the Whistleblower law. Nobody got fired for the Erwin outrage.

When Dr. Hamilton demurred about fading into retirement, and his name appeared in pencil above his replacement Otero on the Web, Ms. Elia flouted fiscal responsibility to taxpayers and created Hamilton a boutique job with an impressive title and $140,000 a year. Did the board ask that Elia justify the job, or did its members pull it off the consent conveyer belt for scrutiny? Does the Pope wear pink socks that peep from under his somber cassock?

A clerk told me that Elia put Hamilton’s name on this ad-hoc job before it even went on the record. Some equal-employment opportunity.

Hamilton stayed long enough in his boutique perch to collect $70,000 from taxpayers and then mysteriously retired. Ms. Elia did not continue the job but canned it. Suspicious, a month or so later I asked the Public Affairs office if Hamilton were employed as a lobbyist for the schools. Why yes, of course he was to the tune of $65,000 a year, making him a double dipper into tax funds with his bloated pension.

This gone-to-seed cavalier is up in Tallahassee now in the environs of his protégée, Ms. Mileto, the kindergarten marvel whom he slipped past any qualified applicants for the government honcho job. That was about the time his heartbroken principal wife retired and divorced him if I recall the rumor correctly.

My intuition suggests that La Mileto is not delighted to have geezer Hamilton mooning around Tallahassee since he is an impediment to more beguiling social opportunities. The which reminds us of the truism that an old fool geezer is fine to help a girl past better- qualified candidates for a job; but then he should disappear into Sun City to play checkers and darken one’s doorway no more.

Ms. Kurdell, who has grown chatty during the election season, a departure from her usual mute podium status, asked Ms. Elia if “something could be done for our people” after a string of budget data reeled from the superintendent. Ms. Elia pretended not to understand the board member. If Ms. Kurdell wanted to cement her favor with the voters, she could have suggested that Elia fire Hamilton from his featherbedding lobbyist job and put his salary into an ordinary-employee cache or use it for supplies for needy children now bereft of them.

lee