The Continuing Crisis
..................................................................................................................................................... T H E C O N T I N U I N G C R I S I...
...To say cultural life suffered while we were in the White House is simply contrary to fact...
...July 1 to August 6, and as temperatures soared the privileged of the land took to frolicking along our nation's shores, churning through marlin seas, counting waves, and tossing frisbees through the foam and spray to their rascally dogs and children...
...The woman could give no description of the culprit, Colley added, because her eyes were "pasted shut" with frosting...
...Arizona Telephone Company officials were still working on an epithet for the logger who mowed down 386 telephone poles with a chainsaw near Flagstaff...
...I sure wasn't going to take my pants off," he later explained, "There were ants all over that tree...
...There may have been people chained to beds...
...After firefighters said they detected the smell of "burning meat," a temporary morgue was set up in an alley...
...An 18-year-old Copenhagen, Denmark youth also failed to remove his trousers-a pair of skin-tight designer jeans-after being thrown into a bathtub at a party one evening, and then going to sleep still fully clothed and awakening 11 hours later with a paralyzed right leg...
...Ninety-twoyear-old Robert A. Rabinof was sentenced to 30 days in jail in Clearwater, Florida, for refusing to pay his former wife $1,200 in alimony, and a 39-year-old Keyport, New Jersey man arrested for disorderly conduct used turkey skewers to commit suicide in his cell...
...Walter Mondale and Edward Kennedy formed separate political action committees to advance their misfortunes, though stealing Teddy's bluster was another nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who in his Hollywood Bowl debut at an antinuclear rally proclaimed: "Personally, I'd like to get the Israeli Air Force to do the same thing here as they did in Iraq...
...On July 29 the Reagan three-year tax cut passed by a devious margin in the House, and out of sympathy for a distraught Tip O'Neili major league baseball players grudgingly agreed to resume their labors, starting with an al'-star game on August 9 in Cleveland, where hungry and thirsty fans at Memorial Stadium have been guarding their seats since July 14...
...opined Gross...
...A 19-year-old skateboarder near San Bernardino, California, was pulled over by the Highway Patrol for doing 75 miles an hour down an incline on Interstate 15 in Cajon Pass...
...The Moral Majority spread its reactionary excesses to the continent and claimed children for its latest victims...
...No television crews were present in Bedford Hills, New York, to record what it was that Jean Harris said to provoke another inmate to punch her...
...I am in love with the English language-and especially the American variant...
...The virile European youth culture suffered another blow when a University of the Aegean study disclosed that disco music can cause homosexuality in mice and-presumably -in men...
...At Folsom prison, California's oldest male prisoner, 93-year-old, six-time killer, cancerstricken Frank Hampton applied for parole, telling the state Board of Prison Terms: "I've never committed a crime, other than killing someone who was bothering me...
...but even worse: "For anyone to say Rosalyn's time in the White House lacked class...
...Bent Mathieson cautioned young people against buying jeans "so tight they have to screw themselves into them...
...From Plains, Georgia, one-time president Jimmy Carter reluctantly admitted in an exclusive interview with Parade magazine that prejudice against Georgians was a most distressing legacy of his White House years...
...T H E C O N T I N U I N G C R I S I S...
...In San Francisco, after a joyous Lesbian-Gay Freedom Day parade attended for the first time by the Dykes on Bikes (a motorcycle gang) and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (description unavailable), relations between the sexes took a turn for the worse when a five-alarm fire gutted the city's Folsom Street Barracks and countless other structures, including a male-only sadomasochistic bathhouse and a warehouse owned by the manufacturer of Rush, a sexual stimulant used widely by the city's exotic socialites...
...translation mine) -WP 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981...
...Bill Walton enrolled at the Stanford University Law School, and the John Birch Society announced its intention to found a university in New England...
...The young man's feat was later dismissed as a prank when it was revealed that he had lain prone through the entire run...
...In Chicago, two surgeons were suspended for 29 days for operating on the wrong leg of a nine-year-old boy suffering from a birth defect...
...But despite the settlement, hunger strikes in Northern Ireland continued, and CARE packages were delivered to Poland, making it the first Communist state ever to go on welfare...
...In California, Governor Jerry Brown achieved victim status when he allowed a federal official to "put a gun to my head" in forcing Brown to take a whiff of malathion...
...We can't write this off as a lifeless fire," announced Fire Chief Andrew Casper...
...Yet for sheer political reflex, nothing could surpass the performance of H. John Rogers at a televised news conference in Charleston, West Virginia, at which he announced his candidacy for the United States Senate and thereupon punched out WSAZ-TV news director Loren Tobia for venturing to ask the senator-to-be: "Do you think your recent stay in a mental institution will hurt your candidacy...
...Summer studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles were disrupted by a "phantom pedicurist" who crawled beneath Doheny Library tables to paint the exposed toenails of winsome coeds...
...In an apparently related incident, a man police dubbed "the Phantom Cake lcer" broke into a Virginia Beach, Virginia apartment and frosted a sleeping woman's face and torso with chocolate and vanilla icing...
...In Indianapolis, Indiana, 21-year-old Arthur Zimmerman was trapped for three hours when his pants became wedged inside a hollow of a carnivorous catalpa tree he was attempting to climb...
...Rainier, above Paradise, Washington...
...Divisions among Democrats grew ever more apparent as a number of aging stars jostled for position with 1982 and 1984 in mind...
...As the now-forgotten Edward Gierek was fond to say, "Poland is enjoying an ever increasing importance in the world...
...On July 7, in Chico, California, Willie Carter Spann, Jimmy's prodigal nephew, was arrested together with his wife and charged with burglary...
...Although Wymer had borrowed the idea from a magazine that provides ministers with teaching aids, secular pedagogues of the humanist persuasion questioned the efficacy of such methods which might "cause the child to reject the teachings because of the association with pain...
...Joining in the fun was this magazine's editor-in-chief-for-life, who sent word from his catamaran that he would return to this page next month, roasted...
...As we went to press, it was rumored that the American League was on the verge of signing several National League free-agent all-starsincluding second-baseman Davey Lopes, the people's choice from Los Angeles, whose batting average rose to .169 during the baseball strike-in a last-ditch attempt to win one of these memorable contests...
...To read the papers you would think that I'm not a very nice man," the Reverend Dwight Wymer of Grand Rapids, Michigan, lamented after being forced to disassemble the home-made "electric stool" he had used in his Bible School class to prod his captive pupils into a better understanding of how "God warns us, if we can learn to listen...
...Carter had a point...
...I love America...
...I am proud of the historic progress during my lifetime in fighting against racism, sexism, classism, ageism and homophobia...
...Describing the case in the Danish medical journal Ugeskkift for Leager, Dr...
...John McEnroe used the day to win new friends in London, and it was reported that a band of handicapped climberssix blind, two deaf, one with epilepsy, and one, the straggler, with an artificial leg-had conquered 14,410-foot Mt...
...Elsewhere, air controllers climbed down from their towers to be first at the ballpark...
...July 4 fell on a Saturday this year and thus passed unappreciated, Americans preferring the benefits conferred by July 3 or 6. And so a magnificent Independence Day op-ed piece by Coogler laureate Bertram Gross went unnoticed...
...She looked like AI Jolson," Detective Lucian Colley reported...
Vol. 14 • September 1981 • No. 9
