Category Archives: Internet

Film-Strips, Ventriloquism and Skipping Class – My Tenth-Grade Idol

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Kevin Walsh

I was nearly hit by a golf ball Sunday and I laughed, remembering one of the funniest guys I ever knew.  It was a scramble but apparently not fast enough for the guy behind us. We heard that unmistakeable plop you shouldn’t hear without “Fore!” yelled first.    After a couple quiet expletives aimed at the jerk, I told my buddy Dave about Jim, who would simply walk up to the errant ball, driver in-hand, and proceed to pound it into the fairway. Jim always did what I still just dream of doing.

He was a year behind me in tenth grade–and miles ahead of me in everything else.  He was hilarious in class, always ready with the funny observation–just skirting the edges of detention … Read More… →

Woodward Dream Cruise: Happy Days, Unhappy Neighbors

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Kevin Walsh

HuffPost_Shared

My wife and I started a Yahoo Group in our neighborhood that’s grown to over 100 residents.  It’s come in very handy as a local Angie’s List for handymen and landscape companies.  It’s also found many a lost pet and alerted folks to local burglaries; we even sold some furniture and donated a piano to a little girl around the corner.

But like any forum, it can get a little dicey–particularly with the boon (or bane) just down the street from our Royal Oak home–The Woodward Dream Cruise.  This southeastern Michigan 18-year tradition of classic cars from the 1950’s through the early 1970’s involves close … Read More… →

“Fabberglasted” – Local Legend of Baseball and Fertilizer, Rod Allen

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Kevin Walsh

MarioRod

I blame Justin Timberlake. Without the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction with Janet Jackson, there wouldn’t be such a long delay of live television broadcasts–and I could just turn down the set and have the radio playing.

Anyone unfortunate enough to watch a Tiger game beside me knows that I’ve got a collection on my phone’s note-pad.  It’s a three year-old assembly that was created as a little therapy.

The title of the list: “Rod-isms.”

Rod Allen is a former Tiger who batted .333 for the club–for his 15 games.  At an ’84 reunion of the last World Series champions in the Motor City, I was very … Read More… →

Arbitrary Arpeggios: Surrendering to “Shuffle”

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Kale

Shuffle is awesome. Just something about that option; that every time we pick up our mp3 players, we lend our mood to musical fate. I don’t even make playlists anymore. I enjoy the spontaneity of the shuffle feature. What’s crazy, is when a song comes on that eerily relates to whatever is going on in your life. This happens in movies A LOT. Cynics and trolls will roll their eyes every time a piece of media playing in the background (radio, film clip, news reel) directly relates to and affects our main character. It happens so often in film and TV. It’s even been perfectly spoofed by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in this scene from “BASEketball”.  [Warning (and no surprise) a bit of vulgarity … Read More… →

Uncommon Sense: YouTube Teacher Resignation Reaches Nearly Half-Million in a Week

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Kevin Walsh

commonSense

“No wonder teacher burnout and turnover are at an all-time high.”

Few people turn pages of newspapers.  Fewer people flip their phone apps to the editorial button to read letters to the editor.  And the only thing smaller than the audience for a school board meeting telecast is the audience at an actual school board meeting.

But in just over a week, nearly half a million people have heard why an Illinois teacher has had her heart broken too many times by the new politics of school systems’ reliance upon test scores and disregard for teacher worth.

It’s not slick, … Read More… →

DON’T “Reply to All”

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Robert Phillips

 130227-nathan-for-you 

Comedian Nathan Fielder engineered a prank on Twitter recently. You may have heard of it already. He asked his followers to send this text message to a parent: “Got 40 grams for $40.00.”  Then, they were to send this message to the parent right afterwards: “Sorry. Text not for you. LOL.” Fielder asked his followers to submit screen-prints of the parents’ responses. Some of the responses were hysterical, in all-caps. Some were surprisingly laid back. All were pretty funny. Here’s a site where you can read some responses: htttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/25/nathan-fielder-prank-drug-deal-tweet-parent-outrage_n_3157077.html

got-2-grams-for-40-bucks-22Read More… →

Zooey Deschanel is a Dark Skinned Male!

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Robert Phillips

 Zooey+Deschanel 

The Boston mystery has been solved. Police were searching for a “dark skinned male” last week until, after a few days, they identified him: Zooey Deschanel. That’s what you learned if you were getting your news on local channel Fox 4 in Dallas. John King from CNN reported the “dark skinned male” part, citing a government official as the source for his description. And in Dallas, a scrolling line below the Dallas anchors announced that Zooey Deschanel, star of the series “The New Girl,” the films “500 Days of Summer,” “Elf,” and other political diatribes, was the bomber. Most … Read More… →

Perhaps the “F” and “Y” stand for something else…

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Kevin Walsh

FYE_Number-blurred

I might as well have said, “The crow flies at midnight.”

It felt that cloak-and-dagger.

“Can I help you, sir?” asked the manager.

“Hi.  I just want to cancel my membership.”

She frowned, nodded, walked behind the counter, grabbed a coupon and wrote on the back of it, handed it to me and immediately walked away.

I looked in my hand and there it was.  The first step on my long journey out of The Stupid Tax.

Financial expert Dave Ramsey has some great stories of how we’ve all made some silly decisions that end up costing us lots and … Read More… →

You Can Take the Teacher Out of Service, But You Can’t Take the Service Out of the Teacher

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Kevin Walsh

Rich

One of the greatest gifts of teaching is spending the day with other teachers.  But even in the department-store enormity of a high school, we all close our doors at the bell and, in essence, work alone.  We meet in meetings that no one wants to attend, by the copy machine that no one wants to un-jam or by the mailboxes, that no one wants to look into–all of these situations aren’t the most positive climates for collegiality.

I was fortunate to begin working in the late 1980’s, when Michigan teacher-strikes were winding down and school funding was healthy. … Read More… →

The Three Things Babies Don’t Want You to Know

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Robert Phillips

sophie eagle

This is Sophie, my two year old daughter, in a diner in Davie, Florida. I posted this photo on Facebook with the caption, “Go Eagles!” In an act that took me 30 seconds, I enlisted my innocent two year old into my plan to annoy as many Dolphin fans as possible. Raising my three girls has been a pleasure not just because I find ways to express my fundamental obnoxiousness, as important as that is. It’s also a joy for all the reasons everybody talks about—unconditional mutual love, having at your constant disposal little balls of indescribable cuteness, the pride in self-perpetuation, blah blah … Read More… →

The Netflix Workout

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Kevin Walsh

NFlixWorkout

It’s like a dream-come-true.  For $7.99 per month I can catch up on the 47 TV series I’ve missed and “not-ready-for-HBO” movies–the films that didn’t make a ton of money but they’re what I might have seen at the theater at a matinee or if someone else offered to pay.

I was a typical Netflix customer when it arrived on the scene.  I was too lazy to get in the car to drive to Blockbuster so I’d order a DVD, wait three days for it to arrive and then promptly set the little white sleeve on my TV for two or three weeks, hoping to get … Read More… →

Ann and Jim’s Wedding

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Kevin Walsh

My parents were married at Precious Blood parish in Detroit on June 22, 1963. For years, on their anniversary, we’d haul out the 8mm projector and watch the film, hoping that the burning bulb wouldn’t choose that moment to set the precious footage in flame.

We’d gather in the dining room and were unable to stop the film due to the dangerous bulb. Instead, we’d crouch near the screen and point out blurry faces quickly–many of them passed.

With the advent of video I was thrilled to move the footage to VHS, then to DVD and finally to YouTube. The fear of the bulb was gone and now you can just hit “pause” or even use a screen-shot to make a quick photo like below.

… Read More… →