I watched Milk last night (the movie, that is), and it reminded me that long before Florida was known for electile dysfunction, it was known for Anita Bryant. I’d kind of forgotten about good ol’ gal Anita. Her 15 minutes should have ended in 1959 when she was runner-up for Miss America, but she actually managed to turn a mediocre singing career into the prized position of FCC (Florida Citrus Commission) spokesmodel. Sadly, as is often the case with halfwits, bigots, and Miss America losers, she started to believe that people should actually give a shit about what she thought. Her third (and final) fifteen minutes of fame ended after she managed to galvanize the gay community against her twisted homophobic “Kristian” views. After divorcing, going bankrupt, and getting remarried, Anita tried to revive her singing career by playing Pigeon Forge Tennessee, but she was a bust (if you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere).
The Obama administration continues to fall all over itself, trying to figure out where it stands on the “public option.” The only thing I can think of is that they feel a need to get one Republican to vote for reform, so they can pretend it was bipartisan. Either that, or they’re just as deep in the pockets of the insurance industry as the Republicans and Blue Dogs are. Or maybe they really just aren’t as smart as I thought they were. It’s not all that unusual, I guess. Good at running a campaign doesn’t necessarily translate into good at governing. Oh well, at least he’s better than Bush.
Basketball season officially began yesterday (if an exhibition game against a Division II team can be considered “official”), and the home team looked pretty good. I actually got to watch the second half, after schlepping my 3 tons of wood pellets down to the basement. Granted, they were only playing Cal State-Los Angeles, but for a first game barely a week into practice, they looked OK. Hopefully they’ll still be looking good next March.
Oh well, time to face Monday.
Oh well,
I’ve never been able to watch any of the Milk movies, kind of like how I put away my records of “The First Family” and “PT 109” in 1963.
Sometimes forgotten in the event is that a very progressive mayor, George Moscone, was also assassinated.
Oh, yeah, only leftists assassinate according to C***ter. She stole this one from Tweety as best I can tell. Two turds in a pod.
Lou Jacobi, Critically Acclaimed Actor of Film and Stage, Dies at 95
🙁 :gate:
For all the football (and root canal) lovers:
On a Saturday night 40 football seasons ago, just before kickoff of the penultimate game in his career, Coach Jake Gaither of Florida A&M strode toward midfield of Tampa Stadium. There he extended his hand to the opposing coach, Fran Curci of the University of Tampa, and they strained to speak above the din of a capacity crowd.
“Jake, this is bigger than I thought it would be,†Coach Curci recently recalled saying.
“Not me,†Coach Gaither responded.
Both men were trying to fathom the event they had set into motion, the first interracial football game in the South, a landmark in sports and civil rights that has gone relatively uncelebrated. It pit the Florida A&M Rattlers, long one of the dominant teams among black colleges, against the Tampa Spartans, a rising power that was overwhelmingly white.
What was at stake that night was twofold. The match-up would prove whether a black team with a black coach from a black school really could compete with a white one. And, in a city that suffered a race riot two years earlier, the stadium was divided racially into its Tampa and A&M rooting sections, and the spectators had to demonstrate that they could peaceably coexist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26florida.html?ref=todayspaper
Interesting that the Times refers to that game as an “interracial” football game. One team was all-black, while the other was “predominantly” white. I guess to be interracial, the Times is saying one team must be all black.
It certainly wasn’t the first time a “mixed” team played a game in the South. The 1960 Cotton Bowl comes to mind, when a team from the Northeast with black players handily beat the all-White Texas Longhorns in Dallas.
I’m sure I had no idea who Harvey Milk was or that he and mayor Moscone had been shot to death back when it happened. I had just turned 18, was a freshman in college, and was more interested in hitting the bars than in what was going on on the West coast (plus there weren’t any 24 hour news channels back then – and I didn’t have a teevee anyway). We mostly got stoned and listened to records (yep, records), from what I can remember.
always a good thing (The Texas Longhorns part, I’m ignoring the all-White part of the sentence.)
Although living in the fog of yute (the e making the slang feminine), but also living on the West Coast at the time, I was very aware of the Moscone tragedy. And speaking of right-wing tragedies:
People also like to forget that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. Tomorrow I’ll be at the new fed building again – across from the memorial. It’s surreal to be in that neighborhood.
Even better, it was the Texas Longhorns with the sainted Darryl Royal as coach. Dirty rotten cheatin’ bastids.
:nod:
Or that nazi Germany was a Christian state.