The biggest lie has always been to keep quiet; and the best life-enhancer is to provoke, unsettle, rile – in short, to make people face the truth.
Gore Vidal
The Council of Trent gathers to decide whether to bless the John Edwards tawdry saga's Other Woman 's plan to buy a house in the Edwards neighborhood so thatthe out-of-wedlock baby, cute as a pumpkin, can "be close to its father and get to know its half siblings; as well the Council will decide whether to endorse the Other Woman's demand that Edwards pay for the house and provide yard and pool service or mow the lawn and clean the pool himself.
____________________
I am glad you set me straight on Jude Law.
I suspected he might be a good father because he and Sadie had a custody battle over the children. I suspect both of them ran around on each other bigtime, which triggered a divorce.Sadie looks like she can hold her own in the adultery department. Good for Sadie. Equal opportunity adultery is part of feminists' core agenda.
That I am ignorant of Law's fathering habits comes from my not having the time to keep up with the gossip columns.I read the National Inquirer in Winn Dixie and prefer it to Spinoza, oddly missing from the counter magazine rack, but the Inquirer is so information intensive that I can cover no more than five pages before it's my time for check out.
My gossip obsession is with the John Edwards saga.The mother of the out-of-wedlock baby that the North Carolina shit fathered on the campaign trail and then shoveled campaign funds to its mother in order to keep her quiet while convincing a married aide to claim he was father to save the Edwards campaign is now house hunting in the Edwards' NC neighborhoodso that the baby--as cute as a button--"can enjoy the influence of her father and become friends with her half brother and half sisters."
This Other Woman is not slouch as a stratovarian, and more power to her is my analysis.
Cancer-ridden Elizabeth, of course, has gone bonkers at this adroit move by the Other Woman.She called her up and told her that she hopes she dies and slammed down the phone. The Other Woman's girlfriends told the National Inquirer that the Other Woman was "stunned and dismayed" at Elizabeth's "harshness." Oh, yeah.
When I try to talk to my husband about the latest about the Edwards case that I bring home from Publix's check-out lending library, he holds up his hand and says, "Please don't start on that damn Edwards story again.I can't take much more."
If I were young, I would train for a job as reporter at the National Inquirer.I can't imagine a zippier job. I believe an undergraduate philosophy major with an emphasis on ethics would be the ticket.
When Law heard that his former girlfriend was pregnant, he did not, as the Ubiquitous Jerks Brotherhood inevitably do, demand a DNA reading from the tot's umbilical cord in the delivery room.Law should, of course, require a DNA test to provide support.
But I am glad to hear how good a father he is. For this relief, much thanks.Who said that and in what play? lee
The Council of Trent convenes to discuss whether the Other Woman in the Edwards saga should buy a house in the Edwards neighborhood and demand that John pay for it and either provide lawn service or mow the lawn himself.
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 10:08 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on If You Can Make It There, You'll Make It Anywhere.
"Lee De Cesare
I deplore injustice and jump in whenever I see a little person get beat up on."
So do I. Which is why I take exception with this:
"Jude Law lives a disreputable private life, impregnating bedazzled women hither and yon--not admirable conduct at all. I am going to send the boy--now pushing 40-- a box car of condoms."
Three children with ex-wife Sadie. One child with Samantha Burke. Not exactly hither and yon. A very, very good father, has always been seen toting his kids with him around London, even when very small, gets along with and takes vacations and holidays with ex-wife so the children have both together, very intelligent and interesting conversationalist (I cite his recent Charlie Rose interview about Hamlet as just one example)...anyway, I loved your story, you are a very interesting person as well...but I am a person that thinks fair is fair...and you weren't very fair to make such careless comment. I also saw Hamlet in New York 2 weeks ago with 3 friends, all of us from the south as well, and we simply loved it. I'm trying to find a way to get back before it closes.
You have changed my mind about Jude Law. Thank goodness, I hate to applaud his exquisite performance of Hamlet and have to think that he is impregnating every ditzy girl on the theater circuit. I'm sure they volunteer. I would have liked to have seen the Rose interview. But I can't read and watch TV at the same time.
My problem is that I don't keep up properly with the gossip columns. I have limited myself to following the dark deeds of that dork John Edwards. His adultery partner with the out-of-wedlock child--as cute as a button--is looking for houses in his neighborhood in NC so that the louse sperm donar can be "a part of the baby's life" and "become acquainted with her half brother and sisters."
This tactical move on the Other Woman's part made Elizabeth go berserk, of course. Cancer-ridden Elizabeth called up the adulterous house hunter with the cute-as-a-button out-of-wedlock baby and told her that she hoped she died. I said to my husband, who has to listen to this obsession, "What will happen to the baby then?" if her Other-Woman mother dies?
If Elizabeth had a lick of sense, she would divorce John, let him wander thither to commit adultery on the Other Woman after marrying her. Divorce would ensure that Elizabeth's children get their share of the estate after their mother dies, which she is bound to do because her breast cancer has metasized. If she doesn't bite bullet and divorce that rotter John, then for sure the Other Woman ends up with a big piece of estate.
The reason I have such a crackpot interest in this Edwards saga is that when he ran for president himself before he became Kerry's vp, I sent him a big check so certain was I that he was a good man. He fooled me like he did the rest of the women. And he did it on TV. That makes me just one of the dingdong roundheels.
My husband has gotten to the point that when he gets a hint that I am going to start on Edwards saga again says, "Now lay off of the Edwards tale, please. I can't take much more."
I had a notion that Law loved his children from reading somewhere that he and Sadie had a court battle over custody. So he wanted them himself. I would beat the hell out of all the men who run off and leave their children as if they were nothing if I weren't old and lacked upper-body strength. The children never get over that desertion by the father. They always feel something they did is the reason he left them, poor little things. Studies have shown that children don't want their parents to divorce, no matter how much they hate each other. People in their forties and fifties still suffer from psychological damage if their parents split up.
That Jude and Sadie have an amicable enough relationship now to put on a united front for the children speaks well of them both. So I will not be sending Mr. Law any condoms and indeed will harbor kind thoughts about him.
But I do think that in honor of not overwhelming the planet, which is the real problem at the bottom of all the problems we face, the four children he's fathered is over quota and quite enough for him.
Law was chivalric in not blaring out publicly like most clods do these days when a girlfriend announces her pregnancy that they demands a DNA test from the umbilical cord shortly after delivery of the baby. Law said instead that he would help support the child. I assume that he quietly asked for a DNA test from the girlfriend. That would be right. He shouldn't have to support the child if it is not his.
I always like to learn something new, and you have provided the something new tonight. For this relief much thanks. Who said that and in what play?
Good for you! These people need to be ashamed! They are criminals and hypocrites!
3:59 AM
Anonymous said...
Good for you, my ass.
You complain of bullying while releasing a tirade of name calling.
Lee: The insomniac blogger who speaks second seems to be a rather frequent commenter on my blog. It's evident he or she is a species of un-fan fan of mine.
I sense we deal with a "he"--a fellow who doesn't like women and in particular does not like grannies with mops of white hair who take stands and speak out.
This species of grumps has no sense of humor. Its members are smart but suffer from intellectual rigidity. They don't recognize satire and mistake it for vitriol. This lack in sensitivity to the uses of language shows deficiency in sensitivity to subtleties of the use of language. Such negative commentators reveal their barren ability to sense gradations in language or in anything. They display an understanding that lacks sensitivity.
One encounters such mindsets in the far reaches of the religious and political right.
Such ideologues demand that everybody think as they do; they accept no other views but their own as allowable. It's a fascist mind that springs up in our democracy to remind us that such types fly all around the flowers and light on a turd.
I am pretty much immune to verbal abuse. I acquired this gift when I was a young student nurse in Seton Institute's psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Baltimore, MD.
It was a hospital run by the Catholic church. Sisters of Mercy oversaw my nurses' training in Charlotte, NC; the order conducted the psychiatric training of us Mercy Hospital students in Baltimore. These sisters of mercy in both locations showed none. Meanest bunch of women of all time to pull a habit over their devious heads is my judgment.
I think they took out any leftover hostility from demeaning the entire nursing body on me: an Episcopalian. I sneered at the abuse and resisted it with all the Jesuitical arguments I was capable of in my young years. One sister was my supporter. She later got canned for drug abuse. I would take drugs too if I had to contend with the hemming in of the human spirit that was a condition of belonging to this order.
Seton Institute further immunized me to being called vile names. The patients took over where the Sisters of Mercy left off. While the Sisters of Mercy might call us student nurses "sloths" or even "shiftless layabouts," we learned to deal with this Sisters-of-Mercy invective by holding laugh-in sessions in the student nurses' quarters. No adults can beat young people's ability to defeat them with ridicule.
The patients were as inventive as they were psychologically challenged. They poured onto us young nursing students some of the vilest, most vivid, most imaginative epithets one can imagine. Oddly enough, the most gifted name-callers were the patient priests and the Catholic nuns (we students called them "nones," an epithet we applied to the Sisters of Mercy who ran the nursing program ). Both nuns and priests were among the patient population.
The priest-nuns patients could think up names that would curl the hair of a small-town, callow nurse student. Most of us came from small Southern towns.
Often these terms of abuse came when we student-nurse ciphers ganged up on a patient to put him or her into a "camisole"--euphemism for a strait jacket--because of flagrant misbehavior, including physical or verbal abuse of other patients.
The offending patient, were he worth his or her psychologically debased status, would pour an avalanche of curses onto us students nurses who attacked in a pack to to subdue a member of holy orders by putting a camisole on the poor wretch.
After we had wrestled the patient into the strait jacket, one of us would say, "Did you hear what sister called me? I wonder where she learned such words."
The "nones" loaded this camisole duty onto us student nurses because hiring enough orderlies to take care of the camisole cases cost money, and the "nones" were nothing if not believers that our innocence through the curses of the patients' being straitjacketed could be sacrificed to the bottom line.
As a result, we became inured to the plethora of inventive linguistic abuse that the patients we put into camisoles poured on us--sometimes involving wrestling the patient to the floor with all of us rolling around to get the erring patient into a camisole. This was a treat for all ward patients. They took up spectator positions and took sides to cheer or boo the contest.
Fraternization between student nurses and nun-and-priest-patient population merited discouragement from the Sisters of Mercy.
Since I have never seen an interdiction that I didn't try to violate, I became buddies with a long-term patient priest. We played tennis almost every day. He called me "Sissy" and never called me a vile name during the three months of my psychiatric training at Seton.
The nuns never interdicted this association because they had gauged the resistant index of my personality. In addition, I had the Teflon shield of being Episcopalian. They thought an Episcopalian was rather strange.
I said goodbye to father the last tennis game we played. I wondered for years what had happened to him: whether he had remained in his psychiatric state (a position I would have encouraged had he asked me for advice) or whether he was pronounced "cured" and sent back on the priest circuit as the Catholic hierarchy now reroute priest child molesters to parishes other than the one they came from to resume child molestations. Jesus was a good guy and had good ideas; but the religious bureaucracies coming after him have besmirched the grandeur and purity of Jesus's gospel.
My analysis says that the Catholic Church--my husband's and our children's religious home--is above all intent on maintaining its franchise like the School Board and administration and the Hillsborough County School Board aim to do. The latter has settled into a pattern of abuse of teachers and disregard of students to keep them quiet to maintain the board's and the administration's power base. This power base controls the state tax money that pours over the ROSSAC transom and creates the power and eclat of the board and administration derive therefrom.
I departed Seton Institute a sadder but a wiser young woman in 1967. I integrated into my knowledge base the data I picked up there to fatten my primitive brain's savvy. If a person in a long life as I have been fortunate enough to have continues to store wisdom gained and earned during his or her lifetime, that person becomes almost immune to such things as third-rate name calling from an anonymous blogger. I print the comments because of my reverence for freedom of speech.
Were this blogger worth his salt, he would sign his name and come out of the anonymous closet. If he exposed himself, I could call him by name and clean his clock.
This bush league name caller should never underestimate the power of a rebellious granny.
lee
Fom your NYT column: "The Los Angeles Angels are not like most other teams."
Mr. Tyler Kepner: Sports writers write some of the best prose in newspapers. But that does entitle them to make subject-verb agreement errors.
The "Los Angeles Angels" is plural in form but singular in meaning. Your "are" should be "is."
FLORIDA HB 669 School Safety "Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up for All Students Act"
Dear Hillsborough County Bullying Policepersons:
Please consider this a formal complaint in which I file bullying charges against Tom Gallagher and the School Board in their twin violation of HB 669 against bullying.
Bullying legislation HB 669 says that, in addition to students, the bullying law covers all school employees. "All school employees" would comprise administrators and board members as well as students, teachers, and staff.
Board members are nominal school employees because they draw a salary; in fact, they make $8,000 more than beginning teachers a year.
What work board members do for this state largesse remains questionable.
No evidence exists that anyone has reported anything so much as board members' lifting a finger either singly or collectively at board meetings. Yet there are rumors that Carol Kurdell aims to employ a dais page- turner to lift the work load off board members' having to turn a page of the board agenda.
La Carol wants her chair legacy to record that she devised conditions that will spare board members' doing any heavy lifting or any featherweight lifting for that matter. Carol plans to make this board-page-turner hire her legend as board chair.
Custom and inclination dictate that Board members' role be solely ceremonial and decorative, so what they look like on the dais is an important job issue.
They flunk the latter decorative duty flat out because they are all triple butterballs except Falliera, who has an ethical problem that is worse than being fat. It involves her home wrecker status. Breaking up a marriage and leaving two little children damaged and bereft are worse, much worse than being a lard-ass.
The Board lard-asses attend so many political banquets and sundry eating opportunities in the high and gluttony office of school board members that they have waxed fatter than fat. Being overweight and an aficionado of food wretched- excess goes along with the role of political functionaries.
No prissy linguistics killjoys need protest that "lard-ass" is a vulgarity. The word has an impeccable linguistic history, having been found on the caves of Lescaux of our prehistoric ancestors along with the bison drawings. "Lard-asses" moves along nicely in the language of the human race and is, in fact, a term that finds its place in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as well as in comic masterpieces through the ages.
Dr. Lamb has waxed so fat that he looks to be three respirations away from a heart attack. He is the size of two hippotami plus a good-sized wildebeest. Bets are now being placed whether the Large One can be transported to the Intensive Care Unit of Tampa General before a massive fat-induced lard clot obstructs both his windpipe and coronary arteries, not to mention his saphenous veins and carotid artery--and fells him for good, never again to be seen on the royal dais in the Board throne room, huffing and puffing about the days of yore in the school district of Hillsborough County.
Ms. Valdes, who had lost so much weight on a weight-loss regime that she once was human-sized, has now sojourned to so many dinners, luncheons, and other eating docey does at the Bay Area political food trough that she has surpassed her old overweight record and heads, it appears, into new territory that involves Plus Plus Plus sizes in the fat couture market.
Ms. April Griffin's pretty face stares from above a plethora of chin rolls that have increased in number and density in her two years on the board. It would be well for her county-commissioner ambitions if she would take off at least fifty pounds of unlovely blubber.
Ms. Candy Olson, we infer, represents the end stage of the avoirdupois plague afflicting board members. The Board solon has nattered about tremendous trifles during meetings to give the impression of her engagement in school problems since surviving from the Pre-Cambrian era when human life forms had not stirred and their existence lay in the future.
Olson was a primitive unorthodox blastocoel back at the beginning of our earth's birth seven and a half billion years before the appearance of the current School Board Seven Dwarfs. This proto-Candy primitive chemotroph made do without oxygen. So as a one-celled podette , Olson's primitive life form managed to keep her antique cell pod in idle mode for several billion more years until oxygen arrived, and she blossomed into her very self that we see and know now in Hillsborough County, Florida. This seven-and-a-half-billion-year gestation ended in La Candy's blossoming to humanoid status in the twentieth century A.D. in our time. Lucky us. The minute she reached human status, she bought a house in South Tampa to be part of the "aristocracy" that inhabits that bigot enclave.
La erstwhile chemotroph Candy's long gestation period meant that she would reap the reward of a School Board seat, more prestigious than the slot of sitting on the right-hand of throne occupant Mr. Zeus on Mt. Olympus.
Primordial blastopod to School-board eminence, Olson has, alas, developed a board profile of far too much fatty extrusion. She has an abdominal concentration of basketball size that looks like a fibrocystic blastopod gone wild.
Hillsborough County earthlings are not without resources to deal with a burgeoning former Pre-Cambrian basophile life form of Candy's type however. There are rumors that plans are afoot to have the school-emergency ambulance team capture Olson and rush the anciently conceived board member to Tampa General for a work-up and review by every specialty of medical expertise housed in the hospital. The Centers for Disease Control will consult. The American Medical Association will be on standby alert. The New England Medical Journal will detail the phenomenon for posterity and Star Wars fans.
Two members of the Board--Chair Candy Kurdell and Board Member Doretha Ethridge--lack the drive to achieve obese status that the four other board lard-asses catalogued above aim to make standard. The two have settled in for the C-status of the pleasantly plump. They lack the motive and the genes to move into the Lardass Phylum.
Skinny Jenny Faliero macerates in her lone status of home wrecker and child abuser who lured former Community Affairs head Marc Hart into divorcing his wife and abandoning his two young children, leaving his little boy's grades to flounder and his girl's congenital illness to worsen. Dr. Lennard told her to stop hanging out in Hart's office, but she ignored him because, she said, she needed Hart's "mentoring." After Hart had divorced his wife and broke his children's hearts, Falliero dumped him for somebody else's "mentoring."
The person whom I want to report as being bullied is Special-ed Teacher Steve Kemp.
The persons doing the bullying are all School Board members and their creature the board attorney Tom Gonzalez. Mr. Gonzalez gets top tax dollar for this work, making him rake in $275,000 of tax monies per annum to do such things as bully teachers in the name of the Board Members, his bosses, who pretend they don't know about such things..
One does not know if the Florida Ethics Board of the Legal Priesthood approves such tactics. It may be worth finding out by filing a charge with this Ethics Board against Counselor Gonzalez.
Here follow particulars of Mr. Gonzalez's bullying a teacher in the service of his board masters to deprive the teacher of his free-speech rights as the price for keeping his job.
At the legal parochial level, the bullying of teacher Steve Kemp violates the HB 669 anti-bullying law in the particulars of intimidation and public humiliation and terrifying a teacher about his job because he has a blog and uses his free-speech rights to address the board. Board thinking seems to be that a citizen's right to free speech is denied employees of the Hillsborough County School Board. The board and superintendent want the public to hear only the sanitized version of board and administration activities that portray this gaggle of thugs as pristine keepers of the public trust. The thugsw want to portray themselves as guarding their children's rights to education.
Hence a lowly field-hand teacher's maintaining a blog and addressing the school board had merited first suspension from the classroom on trumped up charges for over a year to terrify a teacher into going belly-up and terminally docile. Then Kemp's addressing the board after his trumped-up case was semi-settled merited La Gonzalez's covert threat of reviving the charge against Kemp because Kemp had the guts to address the board again about the invidious treatment of his charge versus that of the administrator toe cracker at King High.
In gutsy moves not expected by the administration thugs after his purported solution of the false charge against him, Mr. Kemp appeared twice at the board citizens' forum after the administration's re-instatement of him into his job after a year's suspension . Mr. Valdez, Ms. Kipley, Ms. Elia, the Board, and Mr. Gonzalez had kept him on suspension on a trumped up charge by Special Ed Section Chief Ron Smiley of child abuse., filed at the Sheriff's Department by Judas Smiley, and thrown out the same day by the Sheriff.
My analysis says Smiley was sacrificing Steve Kemp in Smiley's campaign for a promotion up the supervisory ladder to ROSSAC's administrative Valhalla. I understand that Smiley used to be a teacher: a teacher gone bad in my judgment.
Even after the Sheriff's office threw out the child-abuse charge against Kemp the day sneaking snake-in-the-grass Smiley filed it, the administration. Professional Standards Office, and Mr. Valdez, head of Personnel, maintained the false charge for over a year. The board and Ms. Elia knew it all and sat mute and satisfied with this bureaucratic torture.
When Mr. Kemp spoke at a board meeting in citizens' forum (the Board does not value teachers enough to give them a regular place on the board agenda) and asked why his case got different treatment than that of the Administrator Toe Cracker at King High. Steve Kemp pointed out that the Sheriff's office had given the same comment on his and the Toe Cracker's cases.
Mr. Gonzalez riposted after Steve's comments in the same meeting that if Kemp weren't satisfied with the settlement of his case, he could withdraw from the settlement and go to a hearing. The board lawyer avoided answering Steve's question by taking a right turn to a covert threat to Steve for daring to question his, the board's, and the administration's wisdom. This l abuse of logic and language was meant to cow and humiliate Kemp and send him away scared that the old regime of retaliation was rearing its head from the board dais. Gonzalez also maintained that the Sheriff's comments on the Toe Cracker and Kemp's cases were different despite the Times's reporter Marshall's pointing out that they were the same.
Kemp had not brought up the settlement, with which he is satisfied except for the end statement Gonzalez is supposed to write to officially close the case. Steve has even served the three days extra suspension without pay which the administration and board piled on top of the year-plus suspension that he had already endured. Kemp spoke at the board to inquire why he received invidious treatment in his and the Toe Cracker's cases with identical remarks on the Sheriff's report.
Mr. Gonzalez twisted the situation to corrupt logic and language to threaten Kemp with further retaliation if he didn't shut up. Gonzalez continues to play a role in keeping Steve in limbo and in fear of his job's being stripped from him because Gonzalez has deliberately foot-dragged in submitting the final summary of Kemp's case that closing it requires. The board is content with this continuing covert threat to a teacher's job security and peace of mind by evading closing the file, which they could order their creature Gonzalez to do if they had concern about and respect for the district's teachers.
Gonzalez apparently hadn't read the Sheriff's identical comments on Kemp and the Toe Cracker although he rakes in $275,000 a year to keep himself informed in such school matters. In a public-relations gaff, Gonzalez also disputed Times reporter Marshall's accuracy of publishing that Kemp's and the Toe Cracker's Sheriff's assessment were the same.
When Mr. Gonzalez tardily caught up on his board-duty reading, he discovered that the Times guy was right: that both comments from the Sheriff on the Toe Cracker and Kemp reports were identical. Whereupon, Gonzalez hastened into cover-up mode and dictated a redaction to Linda Kipley, always willing to participate in cover-ups, that made his comment complement that of the sheriff. This is known in the legal field as covering one's ass.
The Board continues to allow Gonzalez to delay writing the final piece of Kemp's false charge of child abuse for which he received the punishment of over a year's suspension in a scenario of humiliation and coercion of the guiltless teacher.
This situation is bullying and its unconscionable continuation pure and simple.
Please respond to this charge with bullying overseers' information that lays out what the bullying authorities intend to do about it.
Lee Drury De Cesare Citizen 15216 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com
901 East Kennedy Boulevard, Tampa, Florida USA - (813-272-4000)
Good for you! These people need to be ashamed! They are criminals and hypocrites!
3:59 AM
Good for you, my ass.
You complain of bullying while releasing a tirade of name calling.