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Posted on 08.25.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:39 pm
Amy Hinds, a teacher in Missouri, the author of the blog Living Single in Small-Town America, and a talented photographer, fancies herself a teacher. But by my reading of her latest blog entry, “Really … I Don’t Hate Rednecks,” she has much to learn, too. It’s clear from the title and lighthearted tone of of Hinds’ essay that she’s not as hostile as most people who make a sport of mocking rednecks these days. But she has an elitist streak that is blinding her to who we rednecks really are. A stubborn embrace of the Confederate flag does not a redneck make. Neither are sexism nor a contempt for English class the exclusive domain of rednecks. Plenty of highly educated men are chauvinist pigs who can’t write or speak coherently, and whose idea of a good book is the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Ironically, Hinds plans to use her own redneck past to better connect with her students:
It’s a smart move on her part. Hopefully she’ll learn as much about rednecks this year as they learn from her. It sounds like they all need a good education. Filed under: Grammar and Hatin' On Rednecks and People and Rednecks Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.25.10 by Danny Glover @ 9:42 pm
Chris Young, a Democrat who wants to be mayor of Providence, R.I., proved himself to be both politically and literally tone deaf in an appearance on a local television program. Put that in the category of “things not to do if you want to be elected.” But he may have a future in the ridicule round of “America’s Got Talent” or “American Idol.” Filed under: Just For Laughs and News & Politics and People and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.25.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:55 pm
This is one smart monster buck. He’s hiding in plain sight in Colorado Springs, assuring himself protection from admiring neighbors, journalists and game wardens.
The news team at KKTV 11 made Bambi on steroids a celebrity by posting his picture to Facebook and airing a full video report with more amazing footage of a deer quite at ease in man’s spotlight. Filed under: Human Interest and Wildlife Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.24.10 by Danny Glover @ 9:55 pm
After finding my book, I wandered back to the children’s section to see what our kids were doing. The older two, the ones who know how to read, were looking at their favorite series of books; our youngest, 5-year-old Catie, was at the “Thomas & Friends” station. That’s when it hit me that our last toddler won’t be a toddler much longer. She starts her first full year of school at the Glover Home School this week, and soon she’ll be reading and shopping for books. She won’t have any interest in the “Thomas & Friends” display at Barnes & Noble that has been a part of our family for the past decade. Kimberly and I used to fuss over which of us would stay at the station to watch the kids play while the other shopped for books. Now that my baby is about to be a big girl, I wish I had spent more time with all of the kids. I blinked, and now those days are almost gone forever. I’m thinking we should make Barnes & Noble a regular stop over the next year or so. I’ll let Kimberly shop for books the whole time while I enjoy my baby girl before she gets too big to care about Thomas and his locomotive friends. Filed under: Books and Business and Family and Parenting Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.24.10 by Danny Glover @ 7:24 pm
Remember all those angry town-hall meetings last summer? Wondering why similar clashes between congressmen and the people they purport to represent haven’t materialized this August? Heritage for America has the answer in this video: Filed under: Government and Just For Laughs and News & Politics and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.24.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:58 pm
This message is aimed at football fanatics everywhere — except those of us who bleed blue and gold for the West Virginia University Mountaineers. Let’s go … Mountaineers! On a more serious note, Jason Hardin used the video to make an excellent point at his blog, Imagine Man As God Envisioned (IMAGE): “There is an epic reality that must overshadow and define sports as nothing more than meaningless games. Let’s raise our children with that sort of framework. To search for lasting happiness and true fulfillment in the outcome of a game is vanity and a striving after wind.” Filed under: Culture and Religion and Sports and Video and West Virginia Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 08.23.10 by Danny Glover @ 11:19 pm
Nothing says “redneck” like a load of lettered laundry hanging out to dry for the whole neighborhood, and the passerby photographer, to see:
The photographer, Mark Luethi, snapped the photo at the Weissport Redneck Festival in Pennsylvania. This is the third year for the event, which is scheduled for Labor Day weekend. Filed under: Just For Laughs and Photography and Redneck Humor and Rednecks Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.23.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:58 pm
Earlier this year, I earned my 15 seconds of fame in the international spotlight when BBC interviewed me about the meaning of the word redneck. I owe it all to comedian Robin Williams, whose jab at Australia as the home of English rednecks triggered an Australian attack on Alabama. Now Williams is set to tour Australia, and he wants to make sure the Aussies and everyone else involved knows he was just doing his job — telling jokes and making people laugh. “That was pretty bizarre. I was like: ‘Wow! I’ve started an international incident! I don’t want to cause a war between Alabama and Australia — please no!’” Filed under: Entertainment and Hatin' On Rednecks and Just For Laughs and Redneck Humor and Rednecks Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.23.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:43 pm
Bad things happen when rednecks “think outside the box” — bad things like Marshall University’s band ending its tradition of playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” at the behest of unenlightened Athletic Director Mike Hamrick:
Taking “a different direction” than “Country Roads” in West Virginia is like traveling the wrong way on a one-way street. Marshall has gone to the dark side, giving West Virginia University alumni like me yet another reason to despise the Thundering Herd. But that’s OK because no band performs “Country Roads” better than WVU’s band. Now the master musicians in the Pride of West Virginia will have the tune all to themselves. I hope they play it with an extra dose of passion when we beat Marshall on the Thundering Herd’s home field come Sept. 11.
Filed under: Music and News & Politics and People and Redneck Music and Sports and West Virginia Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.23.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:00 pm
Since the dawn of the blogosphere, holier-than-thou journalistic colleagues of mine who think much too highly of our distinguished yet flawed profession have ridiculed blogs as the breeding ground of rumors, lies, innuendo and hoaxes. They all need a history lesson. The New York Sun provided a good one today in an amusing piece about how that storied newspaper manufactured a myth about moon creatures 175 years ago to boost circulation:
The moral of the story is that there is nothing new under the journalistic sun. Misinformation and disinformation may spread more rapidly and flourish longer these days as a result of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other new media tools, but the media are just the means to an age-old end. Blogs don’t deceive people; people deceive people. Every blogger should memorize that motto, bookmark the Sun’s quasi-correction of its 175-year-old lunar man-bats story and play it as the trump card the next time some uppity journalist decides to bash blogs. Filed under: History and Human Interest and Media Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.23.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:51 pm
Here’s some helpful advice for tea partiers who will be visiting the nation’s capital in coming weeks for various political events:
The warning reminded me of a scary experience I had not long after moving to Washington. While I was in graduate school at American University, I had to interview one of the leaders of the Libertarian Party for a paper, so I arranged an interview at the party’s headquarters. I soon wished I had conducted the interview by phone because party HQ was in one of the worst part’s of Washington. I had worked in Washington for a couple of years by that point, but I lived in Virginia and didn’t really know much about the city. I generally only knew how to get to work by Metro and how to get to the most famous sites so I could play tour guide when family and friends visited. None of those areas seemed particularly dangerous, even to an easily intimidated small-town boy like me. But I knew Southeast was the wrong part of town when I noticed all of the graffiti and the bars on every business’ windows. I really became scared when my cab driver tried to convince me to let him drop me off on the wrong side of the street from the Libertarian Party’s office and about a quarter-mile past all the businesses. I demanded that he make a u-turn and drop me at the office. After the interview, which was in late fall, I was horrified to realize that there wasn’t a cab in sight for me to hail back into a safer part of town. I had to walk to the nearest Metro station, which was two or three blocks away. It was the spookiest walk of my life. When I told my classmates the next day where I had been, they all thought I was nuts for going to Southeast. I wish they had been so forthcoming about D.C.’s bad neighborhoods before the interview. Filed under: Culture and Travel Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.21.10 by Danny Glover @ 11:18 pm
Facebook generated online buzz this week with the release of Facebook Places, the social network’s location-based service that lets users “check in” at stores, parks and other spots and tell their online friends they are there. I’ve been playing Foursquare and Gowalla, two of the more popular check-in games, on my iPhone for the past few months, so initially I was excited to hear that Facebook had entered the games market. But as I learned more about Facebook Places and its privacy implications, my enthusiasm quickly waned. The aspect of Places that bugs me the most — and the one that sent me rushing to my Facebook profile to change the privacy settings — lets other people check in their friends if they are at the same place. That’s a feature made for mischief, as explained in this video: I would never check someone else in at a location without his or her permission, and I wouldn’t want anyone doing it to me. Friends just don’t let friends check them in. That possibility is one of a few reasons parents should be concerned about their children using Facebook Places. They could be opening themselves to potential harm. Filed under: News & Politics and Parenting and Technology and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.21.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:29 pm
Young people (and, sadly, too many adults who’ve never matured) say and do a lot of foolhardy things on the Internet that are likely to haunt them in one aspect of life or another some day. How will they ever escape the online mistakes of their youth? Here’s an interesting and entirely plausible thought from Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
But trying to hide your past could be more problematic than having it exposed. Just because an embarrassing picture, video or statement isn’t attached to a name doesn’t mean it never happened. If someone remembers a face but can’t place a name with it, he may try to connect the online dots. And if he succeeds, a mere embarrassing moment could be exposed as an attempted cover-up. Public figures especially would be susceptible to such revelations, but they could impact anyone. The better course of action is to monitor and limit young people’s access to social networks and to teach them how to behave online in the first place. Filed under: Culture and Technology Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.20.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:25 pm
Truer words about Virginia Railway Express were never spoken than these by VRE chief executive Dale Zehner in the latest “Train Talk” e-mail distributed yesterday: “This summer has been a difficult one for VRE staff and riders alike.” In a span of less than two months, I earned seven free-ride certificates because of lengthy VRE delays. Two were the result of train breakdowns ahead of the one I was riding and a third was caused by a power failure on my train. Flash-flood warnings forced VRE to putt along at about five miles an hour during two other commutes. I’ve forgotten what caused the other two delays. All but two of the delays occurred in the evenings, so they seriously cut into my family time during the week. All told, I lost more than seven hours of my life, basically an extra work day, because VRE couldn’t get its act together. Before all the troubles started, I was a VRE fan; now I’m a perpetual critic of the system, on this blog, Facebook and my Twitter account (@Danny_Glover). I hope Zehner was serious when he wrote this:
VRE already has lost my loyalty — the only reason I’m still riding is because I’d lose at least twice as many hours of my life driving into Washington or to the Metro every day — and it definitely will have to earn my trust again. Filed under: Business and D.C. Commuter Diary and People Comments: None |
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Posted on 08.20.10 by Danny Glover @ 12:10 pm
I like the way Tim Carney thinks. The newly promoted senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner had this to say when the media blog FishbowlDC asked, in its lighthearted interview series, who he would want as his lone companion on a desert island:
And here’s another great Carney quip from the interview: “When and why did you last laugh so hard you had tears in your eyes? When I asked my 3-year-old the president’s name, and she answered ‘Big Government.’” It’s pretty clear that Carney talks politics in front of his kids as much as I do. Mine like to buy me Obama knick-knacks as gag gifts. I cherish them all because it’s the humorous thought that counts. Filed under: Blogging and Government and Just For Laughs and Media and News & Politics and People Comments: None |
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