Trial and Error

The Sypher vs. Pitino trial is taking place in Louisville at the present time.. The two major participants in this real life drama are both flawed people. I would think that if a novelist sat down to write a fictional account of the story that is playing out here, he would very likely choose people with the same traits and personalities as these two.

Rick Pitino's public persona is that of one who is self assured, talented, aggressive, inspirational, and attractive. He is handsome and out going. As far as his private life is concerned, we know very little but he has shown himself to be compassionate and loving and emotional about the woes of his friends and family. He has suffered great sorrows in his life, he lost a young son and a brother-in-law that he was very close to that was killed in the 911 attack.

Karen Sypher grew up here in Louisville and attended school with neighborhood kids, rode in car pools, packed her lunch, wore uniforms, grew up and married. She did not distinguish herself in any way as far as we know. Obviously she did want to have life a little easier than she had it. She wanted to be somebody and she chose her femininity as her weapon of choice. She married and had a child or two and went to work in an office doing menial tasks. She early on claimed that she was being sexually harassed by her boss and took the matter to court. She was not too successful in gaining much money from that encounter but undaunted she decided to expand her search. Fate, I guess, had her be at Porcino's on the same night that Pitino came there with friends.

His major flaw came to the forefront. He has no resistance, apparently to the charms of a well endowed, floozy. She displayed her charms and he fell victim to them. Obviously fouled by alcohol. How could he be so stupid? That is the age old question. Men have been trapped in the webs of evil since Adam fell victim to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Karen Sypher was sure that she had trapped the "cash cow" but things did
not work as she had planned. He "kissed and told" when he sobered up and realized he had jeopardized his life as he knew it. He was a victim of extortion he claimed.

Nobody said she was the sharpest knife in the drawer but she continues to display her poor taste and make a fool of herself. It is probably a given that her lawyers told her to lose the low cut tops and short tight skirts and stilettos so she put on a turtle neck shirt sans under garments and stuck with the stilettos. Yesterday she went back to a lower neck shirt but filled in the "vee" with a large cross on a chain. The cross looked to be about three or four inches tall. In the parking lot, as she approached the court house, she stopped and held up the cross and kissed it! I kid you not, this actually happened.

If you are keeping score I think the flaws of one are out numbering the flaws of the other. We are all flawed in some way or another but we have to learn sooner or later to overcome some of the more egregious ones. I will be glued to the news to see how this all plays out. I've just given the bare bones of the situation but will be anxious to see how it comes to a conclusion. Ciao

Open Seseme

Life before the Tylenol incident,back about twenty or thirty years ago, was much simpler. At that point in history a deranged man(?) decided to bring down the pharmaceutical company that manufactured Tylenol. He somehow arranged to remove a bottle of Tylenol from a drug store shelf and replace the capsules with a deadly foreign substance and place the bottle back on the shelf for some unsuspecting shopper to buy. As you may well imagine this single act had a cataclysmic effect on the packaging and labeling habits of companies across the entire spectrum of merchandise.

You could no longer simply open containers and go on about your business. In some instances you needed a tool of some sort to do the task. Despite the fact that there were some containers labeled 'child proof' (that only children could open) there were many items that could not be opened even by children! I did lunchroom monitoring for many years and was called upon to open juice boxes, Twinkies packages, Lunchables, and other boxed items. (I found that a push pin was an invaluable tool to carry with me to assist me in opening cheese sticks, yogurt containers and other edibles.) Shrink wrapped foods were, and still are, extremely challenging!

In every day life from that time on packaging became more and more complex. Creative packaging was no longer limited to food and drug items. Things like batteries, toiletries, cleaning supplies, and the list goes on, are all encased in plastic. Some things are so tightly packaged that one would think that the fear of the item getting away drives the packager to greater lengths.

As the packaging rage flourished my ability to open things diminished. Gradually my hands lost their strength. I had to have Doc open more and more jars,and when he was not available I perfected the art of opening most small jars with the nut cracker. If the lid was larger than the scope of the nut cracker I had to get help. I have been known to use the pliers to open some of the "squeeze here and turn" bottles like Clorox, Listerine and others. I've been considering asking the bag boy to loosen the lid on the Tide bottle at the grocery. I've had to postpone my laundry duty on days when my efforts to open the Tide bottle have not met with success and my hands hurt from trying. I can come back the next day and give it more tries and finally get it open. The nut cracker can assist me with the milk bottle lids, and condiment lids. The "push down and turn" containers can be very intimidating!

Remember when you could open the cereal box and then pull apart the lightly sealed inner bag that contains the cereal and pour the cereal in the bowl and then roll the bag down to insure the freshness of the rest of the box? Now, I have to resort to the scissors, which I keep handy at all times, to cut open the bag and still try to leave enough that it can be rolled down. Alas, poor me!


It has come to the point that all I can easily open is a book and a bottle of wine. The wine, I have Stephanie to thank for because she gave me an electric wine opener! When frustration and discouragement reach the lowest point it can be very relaxing to open my book and pour a glass of wine and bask in the comfort of my Bogart blue lounge chair and read! Ciao.

Note: if you buy pasta that was packaged in Italy you can easily open it, put it in boiling water and be ready to eat it in record time holding a fork with pain free hands.!Ciao,Ciao

Rock On!

Finally, I think the saga of the Indian Head Rock has come to an end! The dispute has raged on for the last three years. The fate of the eight ton boulder that was the cause of much angst in these three years has finally been resolved. The antiquity is being returned to its rightful owner, Kentucky, in the near future. Thankfully this prevents litigation. Portsmouth, Ohio will relinquish the control of the rock with no further need for the resolution settlement in Federal Court. Portsmouth has agreed to return the rock to Kentucky.

Just to refresh your memory I will review the facts. The rock was on the bottom of the Ohio River when historian Steven Shaffer led an expedition of divers to remove the rock from the Ohio River in September, 2007. Shaffer and one of his cronies was facing criminal charges at one time because they violated Kentucky's antiquities law. Said rock was on the Kentucky side of the river and therefore was owned by Kentucky..

The rock is believed to be a relic of prehistoric Indians. It has a crude carving of a face, possibly done by the Indians but it also has the names of some Portsmouth families from the early 1900's carved into it. (They were probably in an under water carving class.)

I am missing something here because I can't really see it becoming a tourist attraction if it remained on the bottom of the river. Seems to me that Shaffer and his cohorts did Kentucky a favor by dredging this gigantic, eight ton rock up to the surface. Rather than dropping the thing back into the river they(Ohio) are going to remove the rock from their storage place, (some warehouse somewhere) and move it to Kentucky, the rightful owner.

It seems the integrity of the archaeological site has been compromised so the rock will be stored by Greenup County officials until a permanent home can be found for it and then it will be on display for the public to see. Do you see a special trip in your future to travel to Northern Kentucky to view this phenominal chunk? The Heritage Council is gearing up for the anticipated crowds. Kentucky Rocks. Ciao.

Organization

When I was still working at school I taught a class called SOS. It was an acronym for 'Self Advocacy, Organization, & Social Skills' These three qualities are sorely needed by all students but for the most part are not taught in the classroom. Rather , they are not taught as part of the curriculum. Most teachers do try to instill organization skills, and are constantly reiterating the acceptable social behavior of society. In our school the students are graded for their internalization of these skills.

Organization was a challenge for some more than others. I spent many hours of my life helping my students organize. We worked on orgaanizing note books, desks, lockers, back packs, math problems, all written work, homework, you name it ,we organized it! We would even assign them to organize their bedroom at home and have an organized place to study, have supplies at hand, and plenty of time to complete homework.

There was one person in the whole scheme of things that definitely did not internalize the concept of life being easier when you are organized. That person would be me! I spend so much of my life trying to find things. I am always searching for some item that I've lost. Doc used to 'preach' to me that old saw, " A place for everything and everything in its place." Ha! Part of the time I was searching for things, the things being sought were his. He was fond of saying that I didn't have to worry about my purse being stolen because even I could not find it, so the thief would not be up to the chalenge either.

I gave up sewing because I could sit at the sewing machine for hours and never leave the chair but I would lose my scissors, thread, a piece of the pattern, etc. etc. One time though, a few years ago I had the sewing machine set up down in the downstairs bedroom and also had the ironing board set up too. We were working on a quilt for Kathy, I had a stitch remover on the table among the items that I needed, I finally had a need for the stitch remover and I searched
all over the table, on the floor, under the bed, on the dresser top, I exhaused every flat surface and area that I was near, but no stitch remover. I spent a good portion of an hour looking before I gave up and decided that a being from some other realm had spirited it away. The next day I did find it fused to the iron. How did it get there? One of life's little mysteries.

I have lost or misplaced every possession that I own and some that I do not own. All searches are time consumming. Think of what I could do if I did not have to spend hours of my life looking for things. I could probably have had time to learn to play the violin, use a hoola-hoop, designed floral gardens in my back yard, learned to speak French, or Spanish, taken Karate lessons, learned to swim, learned to cut and paste, and the list goes on! A vast amount of time that could have been used for furthering my knowledge went to waste.

Just the week before last I lost my car keys. I drove the car to church and home again and when I went to use the car again, I had no keys. Fortunately, I have an extra set so I used those but continued to search and to engage St. Anthony in the quest. He has been my constant source of ideas for where to look and always seems to find things in the absolute last place that I look! I looked in places that didn't even make sense...closet shelf, under the beds, beside the dryer, in all of the dresser drawers, clothes hamper, all pants pockets, I even looked in my jean's jacket pocket , despite the fact that it has been 90 degrees plus for the past 11 days. On Wednesday Andrea and Kadon came and I offered a reward to Kadon if he could find the keys. He looked under the seats of the car, slid his hand down behind the back seat and covered as much territory as he could looking for them, to no avail. Three days! I was ready to give up and call off the search.

Kadon got in the car when it was time for them to go and Andrea came around to get in her side of the car and suddenly I saw her jumping up and down and cheering! She dangled the keys from her hands and shouted, I found them, I found them! What a relief. They were all wet with dew and if they had been there much longer the Dixie Clipper would have whomped them. My car was in the carport and I had never even walked in the grass by the driveway so how did they get there? Doc used to chide me when I was looking for my keys(it happened often) by saying, " You might as well throw the keys out in the back yard when you get out of the car! Your chances of finding them would be just as good as they are when you put them in your purse or where ever!"

I think we all know how my keys got there!!! Nooo-neee-noo-noo. Ciao.

Reading Maketh the Man

I have shared with you before my experience with learning to read. My Uncle John and his wife Mayme were living with us temporarily during the early days of the Great Depression. We lived in Cincinnati, O. They had no children and Uncle John was very fond of my brothers, sister and me. He introduced me to reading. I intuitively learned to read so his task was to supply materials that would increase my skills. So basically I had learned to read before going to school at the age of five. As I mentioned before I was quite small, so small that I had to have a cigar box under my desk because my feet would not reach the floor so I had my own little foot rest. The nun was pretty sure that someone as small as I, could not possibly have any skills. I was placed in the 2nd reading group.

We had a large sand box in the back of the room that had legs on it so that we could stand by it and do multi-sensory tasks to reinforce our letter-sound connection. Muscle memory, we traced the letter in the sand and said the sound the letter made as we traced. This was a practice that was first used by the ancient Greeks. While the first reading group sat on small chairs and read from the primer, I and the others in my group did our vowels and consonant sounds in the sand.

Every day when I arrived home, my dad would ask if I was still in the 'slow ' group and every day I would have to admit that I was still there. Christmas was coming and he said if I didn't get into the fast group Santa might not visit me. My Uncle John was doubly concerned because he knew that I was progressing at a rapid rate! OK, the chips were down! After hearing this threat a few more times and Christmas was drawing near, I took matters into my own hands!

One day when Sister Mary Albert called the first group up to the chairs to read, I casually joined them. She said, "Elizabeth, you do not belong in this group." I said,,,,,,,,"Yes, I do." The die was cast! She relented and said, "We'll try you out and see if you do." I read perfectly!!

When I got home that day and Dad came forth with his question, I could say, yes! He insisted on the details and when I gave them to him, he, Uncle John, Aunt Mayme and my mother got quite a laugh out of it. You gotta' do what you gotta do!

I have been a reader ever since. When you read, you can be anything you want to be, and go any place you want to go. You can store up knowledge on thousands of subjects and be aware of other's ideas and ideals. You can refer to your memory bank to make more intelligent choices and more informed decisions.

I devoted about 40 years to teaching reading to others that have a difficult time learning to read. It does not come naturally to all people. Those of us that learned to read intuitively are truly blessed. A large percentage of children that start school do not have the innate ability to read. They have to be taught to decode, they have to be taught to distinguish sounds, they have to be taught the rules of spelling and decoding. I spent many years teaching Linguistics to the reading impaired. I loved every minute of it ! It is such a rewarding thing to hear a student say, with awe, "I can read that!"

When I first went to MDS, the class was told that I was to be their Linguistics Teacher, one girl went home and told her parents, "We got a new teacher today, she is going to teach us about Linguine."

I not only taught children to read, I also taught adult learners. The rewards are overwhelming. Just a few years ago I had the opportunity to be in the same group as a former adult learner. We had a hug and greet event and someone asked him how he knew me. He said, "She taught me to read and get through college!" How wonderful to be given the credit for that.

Everyone needs to be aware of the fact that there are so many among us that cannot read, through no fault of their own. Do all that you can do to help them get help. Almost without exception they are above average in intelligence and can be great contributers to society, if only someone will give them this gift.

Help a non reader! Ciao

Heroes in Action!

For a number of years we were a little short of heroes in the sports field. We found for the most part that too many of them had feet of clay. Not in just one sport but in a many, pro basketball, pro football, pro golf, and pro baseball. It's almost epidemic. In collegiate sports we found many of the coaches with questionable ethics and sordid personal lives and underhanded tactics for having winning teams. Hard for the youth of today to do any hero worshiping or find a figure to look up to. Do they have baseball cards today? I'm serious, I really do not know. If they do, do they list how many performance inhancing drugs that the 'hero' player took? Do they list the amount of denials, even under oath, that the 'hero' made? Do they list how many sleazy affairs the 'hero' has had? It staggers the immagination to think of it.

So, it is so refreshing and breath taking to see the heroic tableau played out on the baseball field the other night. Two men that will go down in my book as heroes. An umpire, named Jim Joyce, that broke into tears when he saw the replay of the play that he called that cost the pitcher, Armando Galarraga to miss getting credit for pitching a perfect game. We depend on the umpire's eyes, he was just two or three feet from the base, to call the plays. But modern day technology with cameras rolling and instant re-plays being available, he was proven wrong.

There by bringing tough love into play. The ump is always right even when he's wrong! We heard it, he called it and we have to abide by it. I know everyone of us have attended games or watched them on television when we know full well that the ref or ump is dead wrong, we have to bite the bullet and let it go. In this case the wrong decision denied a young pitcher his fifteen minutes of fame! The call, if called right, would have been the final out in a perfect game. "We was robbed!"

The young pitcher and the umpire embraced and the ump appoligized and cried over his egregious error. Galarraga consoled him and smiled while his team mates showed their outrage. Bud Selig the baseball commissioner remained steadfast in his decision that the call stands. He cited untold problems that would spring to the front if he were to reverse the ump's call.

Jim Joyce, openly admitted that he 'blew it' and did not appoloigize for his tears. He explained that he is Irish and shows his emotions and he wept over his error. That's the courage that we all want from our heroes, how can we not forgive him and love his valor?

Armando Galarraga was so gratious and forgiving and went to the ump and embraced him to reassure him that he could live with the error. He smiled but brushed off praise for that by saying he frequently smiles when he is emotional. What a pair!!

Both participants in that tableu will long be remembered in baseball. I hope every dad or mom points to those heroes as examples for their young sons and daughters. Galarraga said he is sad but he knows he pitched a perfect game. The first 28 out perfect game. He lauded Jim Joyce for saying he was sorry and admitting he made a mistake. He voiced his respect for Joyce. I'm voicing my respect for both of these men.

Galarraga was presented with a new Corvette to help him ease some of the pain.

Tigers -3 Cleveland -0 Ciao.

Stature

In kindergarten and in lower grades of school, one of the tasks of honor, is being the "Line Leader". The line leader sets the standard for all of the rest of the line participants! It is a note worthy chore that gives great pride to the one assigned to the duty. "Mom, I get to be the line leader this week!' Oh, joy! There are various ways of lining up in schools, "Class, line up alphabetically," or "Class, boys on this side , girls on that side, " Class, as I call your name line up" etc. etc.

Wgeb U ebtere Whoops, I just looked up and it seems I have my fingers on the wrong keys, sorry about that! Anyway, when I entered first grade at age five, I automatically became the line leader because I was the shortest one in the class. No variations, line up smallest to tallest. That set the pattern for every line that I was involved in for the next twelve years. Today, it would be considered a discriminatory practice, but people were not as sensitive in those days. In my case it was wonderful because it made me feel important, so to speak, I was the LEADER! I never
thought to analyze just why I was always number one, I just knew that I was and felt that it was my place in the scheme of things.

Think about it! I never had anyone in front of me so in my perspective, I was tall! Therefore, I acted tall. My point being that your size doesn't matter as much as your actions. Act tall! Ciao.