Rocco Gives His Listeners an Earful
Orange Unified’s eccentric new trustee offers a five-minute diatribe after he is sworn in.
By Joel Rubin
Times Staff Writer
December 10, 2004
Curious to set their eyes on the reclusive, eccentric man they had unexpectedly voted into office, about 100 parents, teachers and officials in the Orange Unified School District turned out Thursday night to see Steve Rocco sworn in as a trustee.
If they came looking for a show, Rocco did not disappoint.
Many of us enjoy egg nog during these winter holidays, whether spiked or not; the classic custardy beverage with its spicy yet comforting taste is a fave! You may or may not know about the other types of nog that have been tried with varying success over the years:
Beer Nog: A Canadian variant where beer is mixed into the nog instead of rum or brandy. Rarely seen outside Alberta.
Tofu Nog: Invented in Berkeley in 1973. It’s a health food store staple. Many are repelled by the gray, chunky beverage and its faint odor of patchouli, but vegan moms everywhere swear by it.
Kabbalah Nog: Costs $50 a glass and only available in Beverly Hills. Red string at bottom of glass. Later, clutching the toilet bowl, you’ll scream out the secret names of G-d.
Energy Nog!: Based on the traditional recipe but also includes caffeine, taurine, human growth hormone, chromium picolinate, and “flavors”. It’s extreme.
Hemp Nog: Despite what hemp activists may say, this will never supplant the original. Stringy, rough, and self-righteous. Only tastes good when you’re high.
Atkins Nog: The sweetener is replaced with turkey gravy. Only for serious dieters.
Philadelphia Pepper Pot Nog: Has tripe in it. Avoid.
It was a very special episode of The Patio tonight. The musical guest was one Stuart Pearson, who showed himself as an innovator the moment he walked in carrying a guitar, a concertina, and a hurdy gurdy. I don’t believe I’d ever seen a hurdy gurdy played live.
The first part of his set was a patchwork of cover tunes, all sung in a James Taylor/Jim Croce “Denim Troubadour” style. Painful. Odd choices, too. Inevitable Beatles, Taylor, America, etc. And then “Telegram Sam” by T. Rex and “Walk on the Wild Side”, and even more oddly “Femme Fatale”. He completely murdered a few classics like “Ashes to Ashes’, and committed strange grave rapes of the Psych Furs and a few others 80s notables. His Croce/Chapin version of “How Soon Is Now” left us bruised and strangely aroused.
Then, out comes the hurdy gurdy. And, of course, he launches into “When Doves Cry”, followed by “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”. We were flat on the ground. I really don’t remember what else was in that portion of the set.
After a bit more guitaring, out comes the concertina. We were braced for “Lady of Spain” or its moral equivalent, but no such. BOOYAH! We get “Feel Like Makin’ Love”. As we slid beneath the waves, he regaled us with a series of songs using a Slinky as rhythm box, including “Rock On” and then his closer: “Baby Got Back” almost a cappella with only the Slinky as accompaniment.
Here be photographic proof.
Once upon a time, Michael Crichton wrote good hack novels. The Andromeda Strain, for example: snappy tech thriller. His stuff was mostly literary chewing gum, but like Stephen King he could drag out a good hack plot and slap it around and make something you’d read on a flight.
He has slowly been going mad over the last 20 years. Unfortunately in his case it means mean mad; he’s joined the Orson Scott Card Literary Assholes Circle. The first hint of this was Rising Sun, which was a piece of racist shit pandering to the Yellow Peril mood of the 1990s. Remember? When Japan was going to take us over? It was made into an even worse movie. Thanks for topping us up, Mike, we didn’t have nearly enough race hate.
And then we had Airframe, which as far as I could tell was a screed against the whole idea of consumer safety or product liability lawsuits.
Finally he’s really gone and done it, with an antiscientific novel that attacks climate science, complete with a recondite appendix full of graphs and charts showing how all those pesky scienticians are wrong. He comes perilously close to ringing the Godwin Gong by comparing the “safety culture” to totalitarianism. More details here.
Maybe for his next opus he’ll novelize The Bell Curve or collaborate with Dave Sim in an attack on the Other Half!
Tonight was Technology Swearing Night at D’s.
Steve was trying to send pictures from his futurephone, which with T-Mobile’s fine software was almost impossible. One of those things where you need someone else to send you an email first so you can reply to it with the picture, etc.
Meanwhile, Jeremy & Keri & Lisa all had Gameboy DS with which they were playing Mario and using the kind of language I associate with dockworkers or characters in a David Mamet play. It’s always good to see someone who usually speaks in precise, hyperliterate paragraphs suddenly yell MOTHERFUCKING BITCH! I’M KILLING YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCKING FUCK! at a small electronic device.
Sample quote of the evening: “You aren’t even professionals. This is ROTISSERIE CHICKEN FISTING!” from Lisa.
Danell is the new Network Engineer at D’s because she can, if instructed, restart the wireless gateway. Slap-happy Don was unwilling to do anything because “I’m sure the network guys would tell us if it was down”, until I said “I am a network guy and it is down” and about five people laughed.
I don’t have any tasks tomorrow. It’s like some kind of dream. What shall I do?
Courtesy we have her amazing performance from the Billboard Music Awards. It’s hard to take, but hang in there until she hits the Fiddler on the Roof stuff because that’s where it really goes off da hook.
Original thread is here.
Our elevators at work are made by Thyssen-Krupp. Krupp was formerly mostly known for making HUGE FREAKING GUNS that looked like this:
I think about this every time I ride the elevator.
From Joe Bell, a friend and local columnist:
In case you missed it, the mystery winner of a seat on the Orange Unified School District board surfaced last week. In his first public appearance since he filed candidate papers many months ago, Steve Rocco in person underscored the election lesson he hopefully taught all of us: Don’t vote in the dark. Or its corollary: When in doubt, leave it blank.
Rocco told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he couldn’t think of any educational issues he plans to address in his new role. But he added that serving as a trustee would give him public visibility to counter what he described as a conspiracy against him by a cabal of public officials who have stalked and harassed him and his parents for 25 years to force him to stop — according to Rocco — his efforts to uncover corruption and scandal in local government. There was more, much more of this sort of thing, all of it about as relevant to the cause of public education as Rocco’s conspiracy.
The good citizens of Rocco’s school district who voted him into office deserve what they got — but the students are the ones who will suffer. I don’t know who is more culpable, the people who voted for Rocco because the teachers’ union supported his opponent or those who bought into his flawed self-identity as a “teacher” or those who just flipped a coin. Rocco finally got it right when he told The Times reporter: “The only thing I did was run. I didn’t create this.”
Joseph Bell, Daily Pilot
Courtesy nrrd, here’s the Great Sausage Fanout of 2004. (NYTimes, use bugmenot if you don’t want to register.)
I’ve mentioned bzzagent before here, a couple years back I think. It’s pathetic to be a secret agent for marketers to start with, and even more pathetic when all you get is “points toward cool products”. If I’m going to sell out all my personal relationships and go into permanent shill mode, I want some serious cash please. That’s what the financial services business is about!
Imagine going around pushing sausage on your friends (lol pushing sausage lol), promoting it to grocery store clerks, reporting on everyone to the mothership, and being an ENTHUSED SAUSAGE ROBOT all so you can earn 30% of your way to an iPod.
We are all insurance salesmen now, and we’re underpaid.
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