Jon Provost and Lassie

A new study from the American Council on Education shows that the percentages of black, Asian and Hispanic provosts have declined over the past five years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this story under the headline “Falling Diversity of Provosts Signals Challenge for Presidential Pipeline, Study Finds.”

FALLING DIVERSITY! LOOK OUT BELOW!

Ha ha . . . but seriously, who even knows what a provost is? I don’t. I’ve vaguely heard of it as an academic job title but that’s about it.

I know that Jon Provost played little Timmy on the Lassie TV series. I know that Marie Prevost was a one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty and leading lady in the 1920s whose screen glory had faded by the time she died of acute alcoholism in a small Hollywood apartment at the age of 38.

By the way, I notice that Asian students are continuing to excel, even in the absence of Asian provosts. Go figure.

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

— Despite New Health Law, Some See Sharp Rise in Premiums – NYTimes.com

That headline should not read “DESPITE new health law,” it should read “BECAUSE OF new health law.”

But we were going to get things for free! We were promised better things at a lower cost!

In my day, most of the citizens were farmers or merchants or tradesmen. They lived by their hands and their wits. They had horse sense and they knew when they were being sold a bill of goods.

Of course, that was before television.

Americans today are unfortunately rather stupid. Most of them don’t know anything about economics, science, history, government . . . as George Carlin says, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” George is here in heaven now. He breaks me up, he really does.

Your president and Congress have decreed that every American will have health insurance whether they want it or not. They have further decreed that a lot of Americans will not have to pay for their own health insurance, which means that the cost of their health insurance has to be paid by the rest of you. That’s one reason why your health insurance premium is going up.

Another reason your premium is going up is the “guaranteed issue” provision. “Guaranteed issue” means that no one can be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.

Funny story: My friend Paul Epps, his wife has an insurance agency in Southern California. It’s an area that’s susceptible to wildfires in the summer months. When a fire breaks out, people who live near the fire actually call this woman wanting to buy a homeowners policy.

Of course, she doesn’t sell it to them. Insurance companies are a little bit smarter than that.

Buying a homeowners policy when your house is already on fire is analogous to “guaranteed issue” health insurance: Hello, I’d like to buy some health insurance. Oh by the way, I have cancer, but the doctors think that with lengthy and expensive treatment, I have a chance to pull through.

This is not even insurance anymore. Insurance is something you pay for now to protect against the risk of having to pay a lot more later. In these cases, there IS no risk. The bad news has already happened. It’s a dead loss for the insurance company and they have to spread the cost of that loss to other policyholders. That’s another reason your premium is going up.

This isn’t even economics, folks, it’s just common sense.

Within a week or so, we’ve had Jovan Belcher, the mall shooting in Oregon and 26 people killed at a school in Connecticut. I’m hearing that maybe we should do something about guns.

But we’ve always had guns. Since the country was founded July 4, 1776, Americans have had guns, and for most of that time, we’ve managed to live with each other without a mass murder a week.

It can’t be just the guns.

One of the most appalling things to me about modern American society is the way increasingly graphic violence is peddled as entertainment. Turn on the TV: mass murder is entertainment. Grotesque, violent death is “great television.”

Serial killers in movies are the heroes. They can’t be killed off because they’ve got to come back and kill more people in the next sequel.

I know John Wayne used to kill people in movies, but when the Duke shot people, they just grabbed their gut and toppled over. It couldn’t possibly have been more fake. Now when someone gets shot in a movie, they have to be shot in the head. Shooting someone in the head is horrific. And there has to be blood spatter on walls or bystanders or both. And this is entertainment.

It diminishes humanity. It’s bad karma to pretend to kill and be killed for public amusement. It’s bad karma to trifle with death.

I’ve got good news and bad news . . .

The good news is there’s a new TV network just for dogs called DOGTV!

The bad news is the only thing I like to watch on TV is hockey and DOGTV doesn’t have hockey.

— Lightning

R.I.P. Don Grady, aka Robbie Douglas

Related Links

Mouseketeer, My Three Sons Star Don Grady Dies

“If there is anybody at all who has a dream, then they can definitely make it happen,” she told WBTV. “There are no excuses. It depends on you and no one else.”

— Dawn Loggins: Homeless, Abandoned Teen Heads to Harvard – Yahoo! Shine

In his latest book, The Price of Inequality, Columbia Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz examines the causes of income inequality and offers some remedies. In between, he reaches some startling conclusions, including that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.”

— The ‘American Dream’ Is a Myth: Joseph Stiglitz on ‘The Price of Inequality’

I’m not a Nobel laureate (yet) but I can tell you that income correlates to things like education, skills and motivation. If you’re concerned about the inequality of your income, take the time you spend keeping up with fantasy football and reality television and invest it in learning and maintaining marketable skills, and see if your income doesn’t go up.

If you’re complaining about income inequality, and you have any idea who was voted off any reality television program in the last week, you need to pipe down and reexamine your priorities. Watch your programs if you want to, but keep in mind that you’re competing in the job market with people who are more serious than you are.

‘Big Bang Theory’s’ Jim Parsons comes out as gay — latimes.com

Never heard of him, never seen the show, but do you really expect me to believe that the guy in this photo is gay?

Not once during those months did there emanate from the screen a genuine idea or emotion, and I came to understand the medium as subversive. In its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence, in the disgusting personalities it holds up to our youth to emulate, in its endless and groveling deference to our fantasies, television undermines strength of character, saps vigor, and irreparably perverts notions of reality. But it is a tender, loving medium; and when it has done its savage job completely and reduced one to a prattling, salivating infant, like a buxom mother it stands always poised to take one back to the shelter of its brown-nippled bosom.

— Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes

• Norman Lear – television producer

Kids can’t do well in school unless their family has a lot of money, according to an op-ed in the New York Times, which goes on to argue that massive intervention by “policy makers” is needed to confront this issue head-on.

The authors, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske, are a husband-and-wife team of academic researchers. Education reform in a nutshell: First thing, let’s kill all the academic researchers.

Helen and Ed cherry-picked the results of a Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study to show that students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts.

But they didn’t actually link to the PISA results, because if they had, people would see that Helen and Ed just ignored the three main findings, which are:

• Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.
• The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socio-economic background. [That seems obvious, given that reading a book with your kid doesn't cost anything. Can't afford books? Borrow them from the library.]
• Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.

Andreas Schleicher, a member of the PISA research team, says that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”

Another recent study, by the Center for Public Education, found that parent actions such as monitoring homework, making sure children get to school, rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college.

Doesn’t this seem way too obvious for funded research?

To be sure, the Epps family doesn’t live in a poverty zone, but neither does it cost anything to teach a kid how to incorporate academics into his daily routine, or to review homework every night, or to read a book together.

I don’t think Helen and Ed have any kids of their own. They’re both white, in their 60s, maybe 70s. They’re true believers, ignoring reality and misrepresenting research findings to stake out what they imagine to be the moral high ground.

Listen, Helen and Ed, Ed and Helen: The only thing that matters in education is parents. Kids can be good at anything if that thing is important to them. And since kids are not born knowing what’s important and what isn’t, it’s up to their parents to teach them.

Are low-income parents going to focus their lives on teaching their children the importance of education? Of course not. They’re going to amuse themselves to death with the television. That’s why they’re impoverished in the first place.

Bad parenting is an epidemic in America. That’s okay. Failure is a part of life, even in America. School is a good place to learn that.

Image via Wikipedia

Harry Morgan dies at 96; star of TV’s ‘MASH’

— latimes.com

I would have bet you a dollar to a dog biscuit this guy was already dead . . .

R.I.P. Harry Morgan

‘Spartacus’ star Andy Whitfield dies of lymphoma at 39

Whitfield’s wife, Vashti, in a statement called her husband a “beautiful young warrior” who died on a “sunny Sydney morning” in the “arms of his loving wife.”

— msn.com

Never heard of him. Also, his wife’s remarks are a tad self-serving, but they did get me to thinking what people would say in the event of my own untimely demise.

Best case: “He was a pain in the ass but at least he was interesting.”

More likely: “He was a pain in the ass. Once in a great while, he said something interesting. You had to wait for it.”

“You can’t fool me. I investigate things. I’m like Marco Polo.”

“I don’t understand. How are you like Marco Polo?”

“I investigate things.”

“Are you thinking Marco Polo was a detective?”

“Yeah. That guy who died last year.”

“You mean Columbo?”

“Right, Columbo.”

Borders, unable to find a buyer willing to get it out of bankruptcy, plans to close its remaining 399 stores and go out of business by the end of September.

— msnbc.com

“When Borders started up 40 years ago,” I explain to my son, “there was a certain percentage of the American public that bought books and read them.

“It wasn’t nearly as large as the percentage who preferred to sit on their fat asses and watch television but it was there. There was a profit to be made from it.

“Today, if I tell someone about a book I’m reading, they look at me like I’m confessing a perversion. Reading a book?!

“Not only does no one read books but if anyone does get a notion in their head to read one, they’re likely to buy it online and/or download it onto a device.

“The market for people who walk into a store and buy a book has dried up like a raisin.”

“Books, schmooks,” the boy replies.

• John Astin – actor
• Bill Dana – actor
• Fats Domino – rock and roll pioneer
• Don Larsen – baseball player, NY Yankees
• Bill Macy – actor
• Roger Mudd – TV journalist
• Della Reese – singer, actress
• Dale Robertson – actor
• Mickey Rooney – actor
• Jerry Van Dyke – actor
• Bill Virdon – baseball manager
• Earl Weaver – baseball manager, Baltimore Orioles

Updates

• Dale Robertson – died 2/26/2013, age 89
• Earl Weaver – died 1/18/2013, age 82

“Now . . . this” is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is likely to hear or see. . . . There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly–for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening–that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying “Now . . . this.” The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Image by Abode of Chaos via Flickr

In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Unlike highly recruited athletes, kids who are highly recruited academically don’t get to go on TV and turn over hats so everyone knows what college they’re going to.

Northwood doesn’t have highly recruited athletes, so there’s a Facebook site where they can check in and state their college choice.

Also unlike athletes, who are evaluated on a 5-star scale, Northwood students are evaluated on a 3-star scale, according to the commencement program that I have right here in front of me:

*** = Highest honors (4.3 GPA or above)
 ** = High honors (4.0 or above, but below 4.3)
  * = Honors (Not sure; close to a 4.0 but not quite there)

It looks like Cal got the best recruiting class this year with three 3-star prospects and no one lower than 2 stars. USC and Stanford each got one 3-star recruit, as did Harvard and Yale.

To the kids going to Cal: GO BEARS!

To the kids going to USC: FIGHT ON!

To the kids going to Stanford: CONGRATULATIONS DORKS!

To everyone else: BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME!

And to the girls below: I don’t know you but you made me laugh . . .

MEXICO (PIX11) — Mexican drug traffickers are abducting bus passengers and forcing them to fight each other like gladiators according to published reports. The winners of the fights are then ordered to become assassins.

— Mexican Cartel Force Gladiator Fights and Suicide Missions – WPIX

This would make GREAT television! I’m pitching it as a reality show/game show hybrid.

Working title: Who Wants to be a Mexican Hit Man?