The Czechs won't bounce here, but others gladly will
My favorite polka band, I'm sad to report, will not be playing July 19-20 at the Annual Greater Michigan Czech & Slovak Festival in Dearborn Heights.
I've never actually heard my favorite polka band, so that's no reason to stay home. I'm just absurdly fond of their name: Bob Blecha & the Bouncing Czechs.
As for the festival, it'll have plenty to see, do and dance to at the Sokol Czech & Slovak Cultural Center, 23600 W. Warren Ave. Organizers promise "thousands of dancers and music lovers" gathering from "the greater Michigan area (Canada, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois & even Alaska)."
I looked at the globe in my office, and heck, Alaska is only about 13 inches from Detroit. That's not far at all. And the Czech Republic, home of Vesela Kapela, isn't much farther.
Kapela will play on the 19th, a Saturday, from 2-6 p.m., to be followed by the Joe Tomes Brass Band from Dearborn Heights from 6:30-10 p.m. and the St. Louis Express on Sunday from 1-7 p.m.
Any band that can play for six hours is one stud bunch of musicians, and is only a snappy name away from becoming my new favorite.
For other information about the festival and its food, costumes, artifacts, dance exhibitions and let's not forget wine and beer, visit www.sokoldetroit.com.
The hours are 1 p.m.-midnight Saturday and 12:30-7 p.m. Sunday. If you'd like to play along during intermissions, the festival invites you to bring your vocal cords and your accordion.
Squirt seltzer in my face: I'm maligning Bozo
Not only am I about to speak ill of the dead, the dead in this case is Bozo the Clown. I expect a lightning strike shortly.
Larry Harmon, who owned the rights to the Bozo character and rarely corrected anyone who said he invented it, died today at 83 of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles.
I interviewed him once at length -- maybe it was for a Bozo anniversary -- and he must have asked me a dozen times to mention his selfless campaign to get the post office to issue a Laurel & Hardy stamp. What he didn't bring up was that he owned the rights to Laurel & Hardy, and any sort of publicity for Stan and Ollie was ultimately going to help fill his wallet with Andrews and Benjamins.
Stan Laurel and the widow of Oliver Hardy contended that Harmon had fleeced them. I seem to remember a lawsuit, but Harmon retained control of the characters.
Harmon called me a few more times over the years, and each time, I wanted to fling myself into a microwave afterward to get the cooties off.
He holds the unusual distinction of being removed from the International Clown Hall of Fame, one of the leading tourist attractions of Milwaukee. The Hall defrocked (de-nosed? de-shoed?) him in 2004, contending that he had misrepresenting his role in crafting Bozo. The Hall then pointedly gave credit to one Pinto Colvig for being the original.
Colvig was also the voice of Goofy in Walt Disney cartoons, in case that ever pops up on "Jeopardy!"
As for Harmon, he lost a lawsuit to his New York landlord three years ago. Harmon had claimed his two-bedroom apartment near Fifth Avenue and Central Park was his primary residence, which by New York law kept his rent from being raised.
In the words of the Wall Street Journal, the building's owners "hired a private investigator who tracked down Mr. Harmon's utility and cable bills, interviewed his doorman in Los Angeles, and caught Mr. Harmon's wife saying that California had become their primary residence." Harmon ultimately conceded that yeah, he was lying through his painted-on smile, and his rent was raised from $1,719 a month to $3,600.
Harmon told the Journal that he couldn't spend much time in New York because he was on the road. "I just wanted to bring laughter and love to the world," he said.
Discount furniture. As close as we are, it's the least I could do.
I'm feeling very close to you right now. It's almost as though we grew up on the same block, or you work three cubicles down. Or maybe we're actually cousins.
Art Van just sent me a stack of discount cards intended "exclusively for the benefit of friends and family of Art Van employees." And I can't think of anyone I'd rather send one to than you, my dear former playmate/colleague/annoying relative I see only at Thanksgiving.
E-mail me your name and address and I will personally assure, dear groomsman at my wedding/support staffer to whom I am indebted/improbable look-alike as though we were on "The Patty Duke Show," that you receive 20 percent off the sale price of your entire purchase over $1,500.
Or 15 percent off the sale price of your entire purchase up to $1,500.
Or 7 percent off the sale price of your entire Clearance Center purchase over $599.
The sale runs Friday, July 25, through Monday, July 29. Enjoy yourself. And tell your mom I said hi.
McPhail and McHistory
If this were 30 years ago, we'd describe Sharon McPhail as "high-strung." Since we don't have to be quite so careful as we used to, let's go with temperamental and a wee bit wacky.
McPhail, the former Detroit City Council member who once accused Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of attempting to electrify her office chair, is now part of his defense team. In that role, she dropped a note to Gov. Jennifer Granholm the other day comparing her client's sad victimhood to that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 for passing secrets to the Soviets. Since the death penalty does not apply for perjury, McPhail is perhaps overstating things a bit.
Also, it's useful to note that according to Soviet documents made public after we stopped hating each other quite so much, Julius Rosenberg was in fact a spy.
He wasn't a thunderously good spy, but then, he didn't have access to modern advancements, like text messaging.
The guy who actually did use a Koran
Continuing the thought from the previous post -- quick, go catch up -- there is a Democratic congressman who took his oath of office with his hand on the Koran instead of a Bible. Being as Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota is a Muslim, it was a logical choice.
Barack Obama being a Christian, he went with the Bible. The governor of Hawaii and a congresswoman from Florida each used the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and a mid-1980s governor of Vermont used Jewish prayer books.
Since helpful historians have kept track of this stuff and diligent reporters have read the historians, I can also tell you that:
John Quincy Adams placed his hand upon a law book.
Theodore Roosevelt opted not to use a Bible at his first inauguration. The next time, he opted the other way.
That whole notion of swearing an oath bothered both Franklin Pierce, who chose to affirm his oath, and Herbert Hoover, a Quaker, who did likewise.
Richard Nixon also considered himself a Quaker, which is odd, because swearing didn't bother him a bit.
Having been raised a Unitarian, I'm eager to see what happens with the next Unitarian president. (We've had four: both Adamses, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft.) Considering our inclination to form committees and debate trivial things, I'm guessing he or she will use Robert's Rules of Order.
While George Herbert Walker Bush is an Episcopalian, by the way, his son George W. is a Methodist. Young George is also the only member of his family to speak with an accent, though not all Methodists sound like they're impersonating a Texan.
Today's e-mail alert: John McCain likes Tom Cruise movies!
I want to assume that the three people who sent me attacks against Barack Obama last week were well-meaning. Gullible, clearly, and sloppy, but at least well-meaning.
The three e-mails were variations on the same themes -- Obama is a Muslim, he doesn't like white people, he took his oath of office for the U.S. Senate on a Koran and not a Bible.
Two were just compendiums of the same old rumors, spread online often enough that they start to sound legitimate.
One was based on inaccurately edited (or completely invented) excerpts from his books.
That third one is obviously a political pipe bomb, assembled as a sleazy campaign tool. It only takes about 30 seconds to check these things out on the Internet, and I'm always amazed when people pass them along to an entire contact list without making the effort.
The sad thing is, though, that sort of attack works. In Findlay, Ohio, a reporter went door-to-door and found an entire neighborhood of people clinging to the Internet claptrap and absolutely refusing to consider the facts.
This is not a plea on my part to vote for Obama, by the way. Internet-based innuendo just aggravates me. If I get an e-mail that tries to tell me John McCain is a Scientologist, I'll let you know about that, too.
A further compendium of stricken terminology
Since I could barely touch on the 100 banned words this morning, I herewith present a few more from the list recently created by England's Local Government Association.
Herewith, by the way, is not on the list, and that's as it should be. I like "herewith," and everyone can keep their hands off it.
Besides, "herewith" does not typically find its way into government-speak, which so efficiently manages to muddle things while simultaneously sounding precise and official.
To "engage users," for instance, is simply to get people involved. Some of those people will be "beacons," as in leading lights, which is a nice image but self-destructs when it's amplified to "predictors of beaconicity."
"Single point of contact" is borrowed from the marketing department. It means having everything in one place. "Cross-cutting" makes sense once it's explained -- everybody working together, as though they were 1850s lumberjacks on opposite ends of a big saw -- but it sounds like the opposite, with everyone working at cross purposes.
And that concludes the "value-added" portion of my column for this morning. I hope you've found that it was properly "tested for soundness" and contributed to a "can-do culture."
TW and TW -- Tinted Windows, and Tiger Woods
A few posts down, you'll find a reminder that fully tinted windows are illegal in Michigan. In the most recent Sports Illustrated, you'll find a tale about Tiger Woods that illustrates how they come in handy sometimes.
Jim McGovern, who writes an occasional column in the magazine's Golf Plus section called "Detroit Jimmy Says," used to run Buick's golf program. He was deeply involved in the Buick Open, which not coincidentally is underway right this minute in Grand Blanc.
Most of McGovern's contact with Woods over the years, he says, involved courtesy cars. The golf pros each get a loaner during the tournament, and Woods "always requested tinted windows, which were tough to get because the dealers who were providing the cars were concerned that the car would be harder to sell after the tournament."
Me, I'm figuring you'd start a stampede if you put a car on the lot with a sign that said, "Tiger Woods sat here." As for McGovern, he says he always thought Woods was being a bit of a diva about the whole thing -- until one day at the Buick event in Westchester, N.Y., when there was a rainout.
Woods left the course in a clear-windowed Rendezvous, rolling down a road that was also packed with exiting spectators. When they spotted him, McGovern says, "he was trapped." They surrounded the car and were frantically motioning and calling to him, hoping for a few words or an autograph.
McGovern was close enough to the scene that Woods made eye contact, "and he put both hands up in the air as if to say, 'See, dummy, that's why I wanted tinted windows.'"
"From then on, we made sure he got them."
The potential queen of the duct tape prom
There's a nice mix of practicality and whimsy in someone who would attempt to win a scholarship by crafting prom clothes out of duct tape.
An outfit she made several years ago also provides a nice insight into Haley Cavanaugh, who along with her boyfriend is a finalist in Duck brand duct tape's annual Stuck At Prom contest.
She says she sewed two dresses to wear to Renaissance festivals, one meant for a peasant and the other more representative of a higher station.
The peasant dress, she says, turns out to be the one she almost always wears, "because if a peasant's dress gets dirty, what difference does it make?"
John Dingell's loss is our gain
I love it when U.S. Rep. John Dingell gets into high dudgeon, because he becomes both eloquent and caustic in ways other politicians can only dream of.
Even in medium dudgeon, the Democrat from Dearborn is smarter and smoother than most anyone he works with. But high dudgeon is a treat.
What ticked him off today was the defeat of House Resolution 2176, which is so ridiculously convoluted it's hard to even summarize. Basically, it would have allowed Native American tribes to build casinos in Romulus, which is in Dingell's district, and Port Huron, where the congresswoman is Republican Candice Miller.
As you might expect, the bill was furiously opposed by the corporation that owns the MGM Grand Casino in Detroit, which frowns mightily on the prospect of competition. Keep in mind that for better or worse, the ballot initiative allowing the three Detroit casinos was written by casino operators, and is maybe the most laughably micro-directed piece of work ever approved by voters. Basically, it did everything but include the initials of the eventual casino operators.
Since that approval, the existing casinos have done everything they could to nail the door shut behind them. If it weren't for noise ordinances that pretty much prohibit cannons, I suspect they would bombard Caesars Windsor from across the river.
The exception in the case of HR 2176 was the Greektown Casino, whose owners include the same tribe that wanted to operate in Romulus. The tribe wasn't concerned about the competition, but the MGM hollered, and Detroit Reps. John Conyers and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick came running.
In fairness, they are protecting the interests (meaning tax revenues) of their constituents, just as Dingell is watching out for Romulus, whose citizens voted to accept a casino. But spicing things up is the fact that the anti-2176 lobbying effort was at one point led by noted sleazebag Jack Abramoff, whose fine work in other areas has landed him in prison.
With that as a preamble, herewith is the statement from Dingell, who -- unlike many -- writes his own material.
"At a time when our country is trying to create opportunities for those who want to work," he said, "the House rejected a bill that would have provided 7,000 Michigan residents with good-paying jobs. In a dark corner of a Maryland prison, Jack Abramoff is smiling right now.
"This was his battle and while he wasn't around to finish it, a new batch of lobbyists relied on his tactics to squelch the voices of the people of Michigan. Meanwhile in Nevada, there are billion-dollar gaming interests pouring champagne and toasting the rascals who led this effort.
"Their dollars drowned out the wishes of my constituents, the opportunity for 7,000 new jobs and the need to settle a legitimate long-standing land claim in Michigan."
Next time we have a staff meeting, I'm trotting out "rascals." Woe betide whoever feels my understated wrath.
