Brome Hill

Stories and more from an old Iowa farm boy and recovering newsman

Category Archives: Culture


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Why they don’t call it ‘Morning Whoa’

Joe

Flickr photo by Nathan Congleton | Morning Joe

Forgive me, Father, for I am about to sin.

Well, that’s true if bloviating is a sin and if my typing here ranks on the same level as the hot air generated this morning during a brief discussion on “Morning Joe” about the controversy swirling around Mike Rice, the men’s basketball coach at Rutgers University.

For those who don’t know, “Morning Joe” is the morning cable-TV chat fest hosted on MSNBC by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist. Along with a revolving door of pundits, they discuss the news of the day, which today included Rice, 44, who has coached at Rutgers since 2010.

Mike Rice Jr.

Mike Rice Jr.

In a video released Tuesday by ESPN, Rice is shown shouting profanities at players in practice, shoving them and throwing basketballs at them. For his behavior, he was fined $50,000 by the university in December and suspended for three games, according to news reports.

I’ve just told you as much about this as anyone else learned by watching “Morning Joe.”  But it’s what happened next on the panel discussion that was interesting and points to what’s wrong with these shows.

First, let me say I don’t know nearly enough about the situation at Rutgers to say what should happen to the coach.

But that must just mean I’m not as smart as Joe, who condemned Rice and then passed the billy club to the next panelist as the discussion moved around the table. By the time it got back to Joe, he was calling for Tim Pernetti, the Rutgers athletic director, to be fired.

The whole process repeated itself, getting back again to Joe, who then said Rutgers President Robert L. Barchi ought to be fired if he doesn’t step up and deal with both Rice and Pernetti.

The conversation was repeated at least two or three times as a new panelist joined the discussion so he, or she, could bloviate. I guess this was done because the world cares what Bob Herbert, a former columnist at the New York Times, thinks about the Rutgers basketball coach. Of course, this would be because Herbert usually writes about poverty, the Iraq war, racism, according to his Wikipedia page.

I’m glad I’m not likely to be “fired” from my job by someone as smart as Joe and Bob and the others who are there primarily to fill broadcast air time with hot hair. There must be better things they could do.

But for my saying so, please, Father, forgive me for passing a snap judgement after watching just a few minutes of something on TV. And please show the same forgiveness to Joe and Bob and the others.

An afterward from the writer:

I was thinking about all of this after I posted it, and what it proves is the wisdom of my friend, Larry, who is an engineer and is way smarter than I am.

“Don’t watch the angry people on the TV,” is something Larry often tells me.

But that’s exactly what I did this morning instead of going to the gym. I would have been much better off at the gym.


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Hitting a trifecta of sorts: Iowa, bicycling and Brian Duffy

Photo "borrowed" from Brian Duffy's Facebook page.

Photo of Brian Duffy “borrowed” from his Facebook page. I hope he doesn’t mind.

Every once in awhile, something happens that commands me to blog about it — even if it means stoping whatever I had been doing.

Simpson College photo of a Brian Duffy watercolor.

Simpson College photo of a Brian Duffy watercolor.

Such is the case with this link to a video sent to me this afternoon by Chuck Vesey, a Muscatine  biking buddy. It is a segment on Brian Duffy, a Des Moines artist and bicyclist, that was done for “Bike People” which will be televised at 10 a.m. on Saturday on Iowa Public Television. The segment features Duffy biking around Madison County with show hosts Forrest Ridgway and Suzet Nelson. It also features several of the watercolors Duffy has painted based on sketches he has done and photos he has taken during his many bike rides on Iowa’s back roads.

This segment of the show hit a soft spot for me because it features:

  • Bicycling in Iowa.
  • Iowa’s countryside, which I will always regard as beautiful even though it has no mountains or oceans and most of the rest of the country incorrectly regards it as flat.
  • Duffy, who was the front-page editorial cartoonist at the Des Moines Register from 1983 to 2008, when his job was eliminated in a cost-cutting move and he was escorted out of the building.

Regular readers already know my newspaper career ended last year in a similar fashion. But what is less known is how Duffy helped start my newspaper career.

In 1984, when I was a high school junior and an aspiring editorial cartoonist, I spent a day job shadowing Duffy at the Register. He could not have been nicer to a high school kid whose drawing style was borrowed heavily from (you might even say plagiarized) Duffy.

As I recall, Duffy had worked as a graphic artist in Milwaukee and drew editorial cartoons as a freelancer for a couple of smaller Wisconsin newspapers before he joined the Register. He told me I would have to find a job doing something else until I could maybe someday get lucky enough to be hired as a cartoonist.

On that day, I decided to become a graphic artist. And over time, the idea took root in my mind of how a graphic design studio should look. That’s how I wound up at Morningside College. It had a graphics studio that looked exactly like what I had pictured in my mind.

In my first or second week at Morningside, I started drawing editorial cartoons for the Collegian Reporter. In the years to come, I would become a photographer, reporter and editor for the newspaper. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Yes, that chapter in my life may have ended, but my love for Iowa will never die. And my passion for bicycling isn’t likely to fade either.

For those reasons, along with the respect I will always have for Duffy, I hope you will watch the show on IPTV — or at least the video link. If you don’t already bike, maybe it will inspire you to get out and pedal around the great state of Iowa.

 


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1963: The United States in pictures

Riders read their morning newspapers on New York's subway en route to work, on April 1, 1963 after the end of the city's 114-day newspaper strike. (AP Photo/Jacob Harris)

Riders read their morning newspapers on New York’s subway en route to work, on April 1, 1963 after the end of the city’s 114-day newspaper strike. (AP Photo/Jacob Harris)

Live your life ever day — day to day — and it becomes easy to forget how much Life In These United States (as they used to say in Reader’s Digest) changes through the years and decades. This link to the Atlantic is a good visual reminder of how much the nation has changed in the past 50 years. It’s worth your time to spend a few minutes looking at the 50 photographs.

 

 


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A fun story with a local connction

Members of the band, fun!, are from the left: Nate Ruess, Andrew Dost and Jack Antonoff.

Members of the band, fun!, are from the left: Nate Ruess, Andrew Dost and Jack Antonoff.

In a minute, as legendary newsman Paul Harvey would have said, you’ll know the rest of the story.

At least you will if it’s not too late for a story that ties Sunday night’s Grammy Awards to Muscatine County.

If you watched the broadcast, you probably saw fun!, an indie rock band, win awards for Best New Artist and Song of the Year for “We Are Young.” It’s a pretty good song. I became aware of it during a 2012 Super Bowl commercial. By then, it had been used already by the TV show “Glee.”

But what hasn’t attracted a lot of attention is the Muscatine County roots of Nate Ruess, 30, the band’s lead singer. According to his Wikipedia page and numerous readers who have told me about him, Ruess was born in Iowa City. And he lists Glendale, Ariz., as his hometown. But his dad, Larry Ruess, is from the West Liberty area and his mom, Bess Zinger, is from Wilton. I’m pretty sure he still has family in the area.

All this proves is that AC/DC was right: It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock ‘n roll. And a guy who I would guess has actually been to Muscatine County has made it to the top of that long hill.

Speaking of the roots of rock ‘n rollers: I like the band fun!, but I really like the Black Keys. El Camino was the best album of last year. I don’t care what anyone else says. If you are also a fan of the Black Keys, you should watch this 2012 profile done by the CBS News program, Sunday Morning. The reporter, Anthony Mason, followed the band’s two members, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, back to their hometown of Akron, Ohio, where — get this — Carney’s dad, Jim, is a newspaper reporter. It’s a great story.

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