The Enlightened Redneck » 2012

Posted on 05.30.12 by Danny Glover @ 10:52 pm

The Bible clearly teaches that you reap what you sow, and if you play with rattlesnakes and refuse medical treatment after being bitten, eventually the poison will win.

So it was with Mark Randall (Mack) Wolford, the leader of a snake-handling church in West Virginia who, like his father decades ago, died this week after a timber rattlesnake bit him during worship. His sister’s account of what happened: “He laid [the snake] on the ground and he sat down next to the snake, and it bit him on the thigh.”

Wolford is the subject of a forthcoming documentary called “With Signs Following.” You can see his biblically ill-informed, ritualistic snake-handling practices in the trailer, which was released in December:

The saddest part of the story is that Wolford died thinking that God endorsed his method of worship and that his family and followers still believe it. “I’m proud of him and don’t want to see him die … but if he does, it’s still the word,” his mother says in the opening of the film’s trailer.

But hopefully filmmaker Kate Fowler’s analysis will prove prophetic about the impact of Wolford’s death: “He’s kind of been the person who kept the faith alive. I think we’ll see a sharp decline [of snake-handling worship] in West Virginia, at least of people openly practicing the faith.”

The sooner this redneck tradition disappears, the better it will be for the reputation of West Virginia because reporters no longer will have material to write stereotypical features like The Washington Post Magazine did on Wolford last fall.

Why We Home-School, Lesson #43

Posted on 05.29.12 by Danny Glover @ 8:23 pm

We have seen the value of homeschooling in the successes of parents and children from our own community, including 6-year-old Lori Anne Madison, who this week will become the youngest person ever to compete in the National Spelling Bee:

Sorina Vlaicu Madison, Lori Anne’s mother and primary teacher, said she and her daughter have no problem eschewing books and academic pursuits if the outside world is more inviting or their minds are tired. That means swim lessons, play dates, time for games like Angry Birds on the Kindle, and visits to an indoor play center called Kids ‘N Motion.

Madison, who teaches health policy at a local university, laughs at the assumption that she has driven her daughter to spelling heights, perhaps by sheer will or intolerance for failure. “You can’t drill a 6-year-old,” Madison said. “You can’t really force them to do anything.”

Lori Anne earned her spot in the national competition by winning the Prince William County, Va., spelling bee. Most of her rivals this week will be at least twice her age.

Lori Anne’s educational success is not unusual in the homeschooling world. Her peer group regularly excels in competition. Here’s just a short list:

Evan O’Dorney, who earned $100,000 by winning the Intel Science Talent Search at age 17 — this after winning the National Spelling Bee at age 14.
A team of seven students who won the world championship of robotics, a field where homeschoolers often excel.
Calvin McCarter, who won the National Geographic Bee at age 10. A few years later, homeschooler Nathan Cornelius won the bee at age 13.
Emily Vanasdale, a winner of the National Center for Women and Information Technology Award.
Amy Anderson, who won the U.S. Girls’ Junior Golf Championship and who surprised the professional golf world by finishing with the lowest score in the first round of the 2011 U.S. Open.
NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, the first home-schooled student to win the coveted Heisman Trophy while at the University of Florida

You can read plenty of other success stories at the website of the Home School Legal Defense Association, or just Google the phrase “homeschooler wins” and watch them fill your screen. Students who get their education at home are especially good at winning spelling bees.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Grammar and Home Schooling and Human Interest and News & Politics and Sports and Technology and Why We Home-School
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Comedy Central Gold: ‘Working Stiffed’

Posted on 05.24.12 by Danny Glover @ 10:55 am

I’m not a fan of “The Daily Show” or Comedy Central, the cable channel that airs it, but occasionally Facebook or Twitter friends will point me to a “Daily Show” segment that catches my interest. I missed one called “Working Stiffed” from September 2010, but I discovered it today thanks to a new list of the “Top 10 Conservative ‘Daily Show’ Segments.”

The episode exposes the liberal hypocrisy of a labor union in Nevada that protested Walmart’s employment practices while engaging in those same practices toward the non-union protesters it hired. Ranked No. 1 on the Washington Examiner’s top 10 list, the staged report is hilarious:

The top 10 list also includes a similar report where the show confronted liberal editorial writer Froma Harrop for her hypocrisy. She started a “Civility Project” after she personally had called tea party activists economic terrorists on par with al Qaeda. (Content warning: This video includes profanity.)

This quote from the clip perfectly captures the problem with much of the do-gooder double standards of liberals: “They just don’t get irony. Even when there is almost a dictionary definition of it right in front of them, they just don’t get it.”

Filed under: Entertainment and Just For Laughs and Media and News & Politics and People and Video
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Do You Talk Smarter Than A 10th-Grader?

Posted on 05.22.12 by Danny Glover @ 4:13 pm

Skim the headlines about a new study that says members of Congress don’t sound as smart as they once did, and you might think Americans are represented by a bunch of uneducated buffoons.

“Congress Talking Dumber,” blares the New York Daily News. “Congress Sounding Increasingly Like Teenagers,” says the Los Angeles Times. “Sophomoric?” NPR wonders. “Congress At Loss For Words,” Politico adds.

Many members of Congress may well be buffoons in the sense that they have made the institution dysfunctional, but the suggestion that they are idiots because they now speak at a 10th-grade level instead of an 11th-grade level is elitist bunk.

Here’s a quick rhetorical comparison from the NPR story to illustrate the point:

Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., whose verbiage received the highest grade ranking: “This Justice Department, in my judgment, based on the experience I’ve had here in this Congress, 18 years, my years as the chief legal officer of the state of California and 35 or 40 years as a practicing attorney tells me that this administration has fundamentally failed in its obligation to attempt to faithfully carry out the laws of the United States.”
Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Ga., who scored the second-lowest ranking in the study (eighth grade): “What do they say about socialism, Mr. Speaker? It’s a great plan until you run out of other people’s money. Guess what? We’ve run out of other people’s money. I just want to show you a chart.”

Which sentence would you rather hear? I struggled to find the point in Lungren’s mountain of words, even with the luxury of reading it, but I understood Woodall’s simple message right away.
(more…)

Filed under: Culture and Government and History and Media and News & Politics and People
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Bill Stewart, True Blue And Gold

Posted on 05.21.12 by Danny Glover @ 10:08 pm

Some days I’m more proud than others to be a West Virginia boy and a West Virginia University alum. Today, as mournful Mountaineers remember former WVU football coach Bill Stewart, is one of those days.

Stewart died on a West Virginia golf course this afternoon while playing in a charity tournament with Ed Pastilong, the former WVU athletic director who took a chance and hired Stewart as head coach in 2008. At age 59, he was much too young.

Mountaineers have spent the past several hours filling their corner of the Internet with tributes to Stewart. The most popular is Stewart’s “Leave No Doubt” speech, which inspired a Mountaineers team rocked by the cowardly betrayal of Rich (Gotta Get Richer) Rodriguez to an upset victory in the 2008 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl:

This photo also has been saturating my Facebook feed:

But this clip really captures the blue-and-gold enthusiasm that all Mountaineers loved about Bill Stewart, even those fans who didn’t think he was a great coach:

Two quotes from the Associated Press story linked above add context to that clip:

WVU athletic director Oliver Luck: “Coach Stewart was a rock-solid West Virginian and a true Mountaineer. His enthusiasm and passion for his state’s flagship university was infectious.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.: “Bill was a proud West Virginian in every sense of the word, and he was the best cheerleader this state ever had.”

Everybody could see it, including non-West Virginian sports writers like ESPN’s Brian Bennett, who today explained why Stewart’s legacy at WVU is more than wins and losses:

Nobody loved West Virginia more than the New Martinsville native who spoke reverentially about “the old Gold and Blue” every chance he got. You could have never pictured Stewart leaving the Mountaineers for a supposedly bigger job the way Rich Rodriguez did before the 2008 Fiesta Bowl. …

He was a people person, through and through. On one of my first spring visits, we sat in his office talking for more than 90 minutes even though he had to attend a high school coaches’ clinic that was underway. He asked me more questions than the other way around. On another visit, I was scheduled to drive back to Pittsburgh at the end of the day. Stewart worried that I would be driving into storms and kept checking the weather reports throughout the day. He asked me to let him know that I got back safely that night. How many BCS conference coaches would do that?

But that’s how Stewart was, a genuinely nice and thoughtful person. His players — some of whom, like Noel Devine, had wildly different backgrounds — clearly loved him as a father figure. Players, media members and others who knew him got used to receiving daily inspirational text messages from Stewart while he was coaching.

As Bennett said at the end of his touching essay, “There was no head coach like Bill Stewart, and there weren’t many people quite like him, either.”

Filed under: Adoption and Business and Culture and Human Interest and Media and News & Politics and People and Sports and Video and West Virginia
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #42

Posted on 05.19.12 by Danny Glover @ 3:47 pm

We don’t want our children’s education impacted by meddling bureaucrats who waste our taxpayer dollars twice over on nanny-state dietary rules — once to fund “food police” who patrol school cafeterias and the second time to pay the fines for breaking the rules:

Davis High School has been fined $15,000 after they were caught selling soda pop during lunch hour, which is a violation of federal law.

The federally mandated law prohibits the sale of carbonated beverages after lunch is served. The program is an effort to help fight childhood obesity and to have young students make better food choices.

The principal of the school that now must pay the fine at the expense of music and arts education exposed the nonsensical rules. “We can sell a Snickers bar, but can’t sell licorice,” he said. “We can’t sell Swedish Fish, we can’t sell Starburst, we can’t sell Skittles, but we can sell ice cream, we can sell the Snickers bar, Milky Ways, all that stuff.”

This is the second time in three months that school food police have made news. The first time they were caught confiscating a child’s lunch from home.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Food and Government and News & Politics and Why We Home-School
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The Obama Legacy

Posted on 05.18.12 by Danny Glover @ 1:29 pm

President Obama’s website team was busted this week for rewriting presidential history by inserting Obama-friendly text into the White House biographies of almost every president who has served dating back to the 1920s — 13 presidents in all.

That ego-driven messaging tactic created great fodder for this parody video of “America’s fourth-greatest president”:

Filed under: Government and History and Just For Laughs and News & Politics and People and Video
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Storytelling The Ken Burns Way

Posted on 05.17.12 by Danny Glover @ 10:02 pm

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns knows how to tell stories. He has told them brilliantly about defining political and cultural moments in American history — the Civil War, the sport of baseball, jazz music, World War II, national parks and Prohibition.

Today in a short Washington Post film, Burns shared his thoughts about what makes a great story. Here are the highlights, with the film embedded below:

“The common story is 1+1=2. … The real genuine stories are about 1 and 1 equaling three. … The things that matter most to us — some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason — is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
“The stories that I like to tell are always interesting because the good guys have really serious flaws and the villains are very compelling. My interest is always in complicating things.”
“All story is manipulation. … Is there acceptable manipulation you bet. People say, ‘Oh boy, I was so moved to tears in your film.’ That’s a good thing? I manipulated that. That’s part of storytelling. I didn’t do it disingenuously. I did it sincerely. I am moved by that, too. That’s manipulation.”
“We tell stories to continue ourselves. We all think an exception is going to be made in our case, and we’re going to live forever. And being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that that’s not going to be. Story is there to just remind us that it’s just OK.”

Filed under: Entertainment and History and People and Sports and Video
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All The Fishy Trouble You Can Eat

Posted on 05.17.12 by Danny Glover @ 1:45 pm

All-you-can-eat specials have survived the test of culinary time because restaurants make a profit from them. But eventually some large redneck with a larger appetite is bound to make a diner pay for promising an endless supply of food for a set price.

Enter Bill Wisth, the 6-foot-6, 350-pound fish fan that Chuck’s Place in Thiensville, Wis., wishes it hadn’t caught on all-you-can-eat night:

Picking a fight with Wisth after he downed at least a dozen pieces of fish but wanted more probably wasn’t the best marketing tactic for Chuck’s Place. The family restaurant has had problems with Wisth before. This time, he decided to protest the restaurant’s decision to try to cap his food intake.

Word spread far beyond tiny Thiensville, as the story has been told by The Christian Post, Christian Science Monitor, Eater, Gawker, The Huffington Post, International Business Times, NPR, New York Magazine, UPI and many more news outlets.

“I can’t believe how slow a news day it is when they’re bringing camera crews out here,” Chuck’s Place owner Ted Hagen said. “… A radio station in Toronto said they’d give me $200 if I’d let him back in and they could film him eating the fish. I said, ‘I don’t think so.’”

Filed under: Food and Human Interest and Media and News & Politics and People and Rednecks and Video
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The Man vs. The State

Posted on 05.17.12 by Danny Glover @ 1:13 pm

A Facebook friend shared this illustration today. It’s funny and sad at the same time:

The message: Teach a man to fish … and the government will steal his fish.

If you know the origins of the image, please let me know in the comments so I can give proper credit and a link to the source.

Filed under: Culture and Government and Just For Laughs and News & Politics
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How The Legendary ‘Flying WV’ Was Born

Posted on 05.15.12 by Danny Glover @ 2:58 pm

I was born more than a decade before West Virginia University football players started sporting the current logo on their helmets, but I don’t remember seeing what came before the “Flying WV” we Mountaineers cherish today. Now I know the story behind that storied logo, which has made WVU “one of the top royalty-producing colleges in the country.”

Jake Stump of the WVU Alumni Magazine unearthed the details in what he called “hardnosed, investigative (ahem) journalism.” It all started in 1979 with the arrival of new football coach Don Nehlen to the campus. The old football uniform, helmet and logo, with “WVU” overlaying an outlined map of West Virginia, had no pizzazz, so Nehlen commissioned one to make a statement.

The details of the logo’s past remain murky even after Stump’s research because Nehlen and the other people behind the vision and the design don’t remember events exactly the same. But the story is fascinating anyway (at least for Mountaineers fans like me). Here’s the heart of it:

What we now know and love as the “Flying WV” was born on a sheet of wax paper. John Boyd Martin’s main inspiration? Mountains. Yes. West Virginia has mountains. WVU’s mascot is a mountaineer. Such an obvious fit.

“The first thing I did was play around with the initials,” Martin said. “When you put a W and a V together, you had mountains. They may call it the ‘Flying WV,’ but to me, it depicts mountains.”
(more…)

Filed under: 1980s and Advertising and Business and Culture and Human Interest and People and Sports and West Virginia
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Politico vs. The Washington Post

Posted on 05.15.12 by Danny Glover @ 8:11 am

When you attend the annual Milblog Conference, you can expect to hear defense hawks and the bloggers they love sniping at the media. But this year’s conference, hosted by Military.com for the first time and held over the weekend in Arlington, Va., featured a bonus — journalists sniping at each other.

The pointed but brief rhetorical clash between defense reporters Austin Wright of Politico and Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post occurred as the two pondered the changing media landscape. It got personal when Wright framed the discussion in the context of the rise of Politico and corresponding fall of the Post (as seen most recently in another round of buyouts and an 8 percent drop in revenue).

He credited Politico’s success in part to its mastery of “niche journalism.” “Politico specializes in politics, and if advertisers want to reach people in politics, they advertise in Politico. If people want to advertise to people who watch sports, they advertise in ESPN,” Wright said. “And it’s harder to figure out what the audience is for The Washington Post because it’s such a broad [audience]. I think it’s a really big problem.”

Jaffe’s journalistic hackles raised at that last comment:

I think we put out a product that’s significantly better than Politico, which I find very chatty and very reactive and doesn’t provide much context. It’s a publication for this tiny percentage of insiders and doesn’t have bureaus or newsrooms.
(more…)

Filed under: Blogging and Business and Media and People
Comments: 1 Comment

Mitchell Guist Of ‘Swamp People’ Dies In Fall

Posted on 05.14.12 by Danny Glover @ 4:27 pm

“Swamp People” is quality entertainment for rednecks across America, and today we are mourning the loss of one of the reality show’s regulars. Mitchell Guist, one of two gray-bearded eccentric brothers on the History Channel series, died after a fall on his boat.

I first saw the news in an announcement posted on the Facebook page of “Swamp People,” along with the photo that I’ve reprinted here:

We are extremely saddened to report that our friend and beloved member of the “Swamp People” family, Mitchell Guist, has passed away earlier today. Mitchell passed on the swamp, doing what he loved. We appreciate your respect for the Guist family’s privacy and hope you join us in sending our thoughts and prayers to his brother, Glenn, and the rest of the Guist family.

Associated Press shared more details about the accident based on a report from the local sheriff. Guist fell “while aboard his boat on the Intracoastal Waterway, near Pierre Part. … Guist was traveling on Belle River around 9 a.m. when he fell. The boat returned to a nearby landing in St. Martin and Guist was taken to a hospital. The cause of his fall is unclear.”

Mitchell Guist and his brother, Glenn, didn’t appear on the show often, but they were a hoot whenever they did, whether hunting squirrels, catching gar or cooking crawfish. I didn’t like the Guist brothers’ salty language, but I will miss hearing the trademark Guist “oh, yee yah” in Mitchell’s voice.

Filed under: Entertainment and History and News & Politics and People and Rednecks
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The Obit Writer’s Obit

Posted on 05.14.12 by Danny Glover @ 3:29 pm

I started my journalism career as a copy clerk and obituary writer at The Tampa Tribune and periodically dream of starting a business built around story-length, multimedia obituaries, so I appreciated this obit about a woman who made a career out of writing story obits:

[Gerry Hostetler] felt that there were many people whose stories deserved more than the bare essentials. “I would do an occasional obit-news story,” Gerry said, “and they became quite popular. That prompted me to envision a column with more information and, above all, more warmth.”

Gerry learned to cope with a grieving spouse by asking how the pair met. “Almost immediately, he or she was back in the moment and ended up laughing about their dates. I loved that! I always felt that listening to them reminisce was so healing for them. I loved writing these stories, which not only filled a deep need for our readers, but also fed my hunger to write.”

The kicker to the story: It was the last obit Gerry Hostetler ever wrote for the Charlotte Observer. She penned her own obit before her death from complications of a stroke.

Filed under: Human Interest and Media and News & Politics and People
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Why We Home-School, Lesson #41

Posted on 05.01.12 by Danny Glover @ 10:54 am

We want to give our children the flexibility they need to be able to recognize their dreams, like 17-year-old Emily Vanasdale of Zanesville, Ohio. She is an Ohio winner of the National Center for Women and Information Technology Award:

Vanasdale has successfully created games and applications that earned rave reviews. Her most recent project was an Android app for the Restoration that featured information about the event and links to bands’ and speakers’ pages.

She also produced winning games for Muskingum University’s Games By Teens Contest. The contest began in 2009. Vanasdale took top-three spots each consecutive year — second place in 2009 with “Running to Freedom,” second place in 2010 with “Running to Freedom 2,” and first place in 2011 with “Skylar Keyes and the Nazi Loot.” They can be downloaded at gamesbyteens.org.

Vanasdale was home-schooled. As the Home School Legal Defense Association noted on its Facebook page, “Imagine how limited Emily’s world would have been if she was in public school.”

Today’s lesson comes with bonus instruction from close to home, courtesy of the Richmond Times Dispatch. The paper published a detailed feature about homeschooling in Virginia on Sunday.

The positive lessons about homeschooling in that lesson included this insight from a parent: “You can go as deeply into what your kids are interested in as you want to, and you’re not held back by a curriculum or timetable.” That’s undoubtedly one reason that Vanasdale excelled in Ohio.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)

Filed under: Home Schooling and News & Politics and People and Why We Home-School
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