The first time I bought a totally portable battery-operated radio, I believed I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gone to Heaven. Even though I was able to receive only one station, KFUN-AM, I enjoyed listening to the Game of the Day as I delivered papers on my Optic route, which comprised two streets across the tracks, Railroad (which we call Tough Street), Grand and parts of First and Second.<\/p>\n
I taped the small radio to the handlebars and got fairly good reception. That made me a Brooklyn Dodger fan, as that team was on the air most often.<\/p>\n
And I thought, way back in 1952 that sound technology had reached the highest peaks.<\/p>\n
That was long before tiny, yet powerful, things like cell phones came along. And with them came something called Facebook, which I happily admit, has obsessed many, including and especially me.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m addicted. Day after day, I come across lots of drivel; if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not someone wanting to sell us something, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another person hoping to convert us.<\/p>\n
Most of my life, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been addicted to the groan. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what follows a horrible attempt at humor. Please realize that when someone attempts a joke, people usually laugh out of courtesy, or because \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the thing to do.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
A friend with whom I taught many summer journalism classes at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff explained all about the making of kidney pies (I kidney you not!) My friend Martin wrote as if kidney were something edible. Then he gave the prices people in places like Puerto Rico and Jamaica pay for such pies.<\/p>\n
And he called his research \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Pie Rates of the Caribbean.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Can there be any pun more groan-worthy than that one?<\/p>\n
Another friend presented a photo of Leonard Nimoy, of Star Trek. The message was, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to tell from this angle, but Spock actually has three ears: The left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
How much more of these atrocious puns can a person take? Stick around: The worst is yet to come.<\/p>\n
Another person forwarded a drawing of a pair of dressing room doors for the character Hamlet. The door on the left contains a sign: \u00e2\u20ac\u01532B\u00e2\u20ac\u009d; the one on the right reads \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Not 2-B,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which is probably the way Shakespeare would have labeled each door.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
The Optic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s weekly Thumbs feature received a bit of reaction Friday, shortly after the newspaper hit the streets. On his morning talk show, Joseph Baca of Radio KFUN, referred to the three thumbs down that appeared on our editorial page.<\/p>\n
Although each item was a thumb down, Baca gave them his own thumbs up. The item that drew the most attention was our mention of hundreds of tires strewn around the Camp Luna area, near the site of the old city dump. We mentioned heaps of used, damaged, rotting tires, some of which were bundled together to keep them in one place.<\/p>\n
Many other tires are strewn in all directions. The Optic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s thumbs down mentioned that such dumping is illegal, extremely unsanitary and possibly hazardous. It seems obvious that whoever dumped them was hoping to avoid paying a fee, and instead took the tires directly to the nearby dump.<\/p>\n
Baca applauded our thumbs entries. But before ending his program, Baca said he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d received a phone call from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153some lady\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who explained that the tires hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exactly been dumped at the site but placed there in order to help police with training.<\/p>\n
That explanation seems plausible \u00e2\u20ac\u201d until we question what kind of training the police would be conducting. Would they mount the tires on fast-moving vehicles so cops could practice shooting out tires during high-speed chases?<\/p>\n
The illegal act of dumping the tires \u00e2\u20ac\u201d at a site far from the shooting range that police use just doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sound credible. If police were indeed planning to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153practice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with the worn-out tires, wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t someone have moved the tires closer, or even inside, the shooting range to the north?<\/p>\n
Despite the anonymous woman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s implausible explanation as to the purpose of the tire-o-rama event near the dump, we believe the public needs to be informed at the beginning as to the purpose of the dumped tires.<\/p>\n
It would be helpful if we could discover how long the tires have been in those several places, how long they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll remain, and whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s OK for residents to donate tires to the site.<\/p>\n
The public also would like to know more about the time and method of disposal of the tires when the presumed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153police training\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is completed, and \u00e2\u20ac\u201d more importantly \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whether the dumpers were merely trying to avoid a disposal fee.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take long for my teenaged granddaughter to stop reading a book that had to have been written by the clich\u00c3\u00a9 champion of the century.<\/p>\n
In the first few pages, Carly came across the following sentences: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He nodded his head,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153She shrugged her shoulders\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He wore a happy smile on his face.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
To this we ask, what can one nod besides a head, what can we shrug besides our shoulders, can a smile ever be unhappy, and where else would one wear that smile?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first time I bought a totally portable battery-operated radio, I believed I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gone to Heaven. Even though I was able to receive only one station, KFUN-AM, I enjoyed listening to the Game of the Day as I delivered papers on my Optic route, which comprised two streets across the tracks, Railroad (which we call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1651,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650\/revisions\/1651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}