Steffan Piper's Blog, page 12

This is about public education and I promise you, however concise, it will be dark and full of thunderclouds. Stop reading now if you have a weak stomach.


In the last ten years, I've seen people become hyper obsessed with celebrities to the point where it becomes all consuming and these people no longer resemble your friends -- and if you've ever lived in Los Angeles or Hollywood proper – then you probably know exactly what I mean. The sad truth is that it's this way all over the place. I see ...

I've always loved this song and I recently heard this played while I was stuck butlering  / buttling around mi casa the other day. The Television was on Channel 800 something, those channels that only play music, and it came on. It occurred to me that I hadn't heard this in over a decade or more. I used to hear this song often when I was sleeping -- yes, in the depths of rest -- when I was but a lad in britches (along with a lot of Frankie Valley for some reason, too).

First of all, I have a love-hate relationship with Garrison Keillor. 
Sometimes when I find myself in the car on Sundays listening to him on NPR and his Pappy O'Dan'el's Flour Hour Sermon on the mount, I just want to shake my head and pray that his cult-laden neuvo-amish hordes don't take over modern American sentiment and set sail with tea-party types into the new revolution. It's just too niche for me. But then … some nights, after coming home from class on Thursday nights, I flip NPR back...

  There was a distant chapter in my own past not too long ago, but long enough that I rarely think on it where I once lived in Brentwood, California; a small inner-city suburb of Los Angeles. The reality of Brentwood is that it's home to mostly multi-million dollar estates that belong to film and television people of all stripes and in the mid-nineties, when I lived there, it was a place that everybody regularly saw on their television set, regardless where they were living. The place also...