Why I don’t understand guys like Tony Parker. And Jim Morrison, pardoned?

I think average-looking guys like myself always are shocked when we hear news like this week’s celebrity gossip, when the super-gorgeous Eva Longoria announced she was divorcing Tony Parker, the San Antonio Spurs basketball star.
Apparently, according to A.C. Slater (I mean, Longoria’s friend Mario Lopez, who played A.C. Slater on TV), Longoria found a bevy of text messages from the wife of one of Parker’s Spurs teammates, on Parker’s phone.
I don’t get it. I just don’t. Tony, sweetheart, you’re married to Eva Longoria, one of the most beautiful women in the world.  What would possess you, an NBA star with fame and fortune beyond your wildest dreams, to find Eva Longoria, not enough for you?
Maybe Eva is mean in real life.
Maybe Tony no longer respected her work on “Desperate Housewives.” Maybe hanging around all those beautiful women who stalk/follow NBA players made him weak.
Whatever it is, it’s astonishing to me. And Eva, I’m here for you if you need a shoulder to cry on.

**So here’s something our current governor of Florida can hang his hat on: Sure, he didn’t win his Senate race, but Charlie Crist is trying to right a historical wrong: He’s trying to get Jim Morrison pardoned.
For those who are not Morrison fans, or have forgotten, the Doors lead singer was arrested and later convicted of exposing himself at a 1969 concert in Miami.
A great phrase from this story: “The evidence Morrison unzipped his pants was flimsy.” I’ll let you make your own joke there, this is a family blog (then again, I did write last week about the woman who attacked the police with a sex toy.)
I also like the sentence “none of the 100 photos admitted into evidence showed Morrison’s genitals.”
I love it when politicians get involved in this stuff, because really, who’s going to argue against it? The morals police? Free Jim Morrison.
But not, of course, his genitals. Those should stay packed away. And apparently in 1969, they did.

Myron Rolle, an athlete to root for. And Charlie Crist flies solo, literally

I haven’t given you an athlete to root for in a while, so let me tell you a little about new Tennesee Titan Myron Rolle.

Rolle was a star defensive back at Florida State, with good speed, great cover ability, and all that you’d normally be looking for in an NFL player.

He’s also one of the smartest college football players in America, and I don’t mean that like, he knows when to blitz. He didn’t play for Florida State last year because he’d won a Rhodes Scholarship, and took a year away from football to study at Oxford.

So who wouldn’t want a guy like this on their NFL team? He’s a great football player, a role model (he wants to open up free medical clinics in the Bahamas, among other things), and an incredibly intelligent young man.

And yet, Rolle lasted until the end of the sixth round last week in the Draft, when Tennessee plucked him.

Why did he fall so far? Because NFL teams are scared of smart people. Seriously. They don’t want guys with other outside interests, or players who are too “smart” for their own good. Some even asked Rolle how he could “desert” his team last year to take the Rhodes scholarship.

This is pathetic. The NFL is filled with morons who only know how to read a playbook. And here’s a guy with some actual “life” skills and intelligence that can’t be shown on a blackboard with X’s and O’s on it, and he gets passed over for six rounds.

I hope Myron Rolle becomes an NFL All-Pro. He’s exactly the kind of role model the NFL needs, not guys like Terrell Owens.

Here’s a good column by Jemele Hill on Rolle, and a great background story from last October by Pete Thamel in the New York Times.

**And now, just for fun, and because I can’t watch it enough, Leo and Ainsley’s first interview from “The West Wing.”

**So the big political news here in God’s Waiting Room Thursday was Florida governor Charlie Crist, a man who once described himself as a “Ronald Reagan Republican,” deciding to bolt the GOP and run for the U.S. Senate as an independent.

This is no principled change of heart for old Charlie, though he doesn’t really fit in with the new hard-right Republican party. He was going to get drubbed in the upcoming primary by Marco Rubio, so Crist realized the only way he could win would be to run as a third-party candidate.

Is he going to win a general election? Probably not. I’m hoping he and Rubio spend the next six months beating up on each other, so Democrat Kendrick Meek can win.

What kinda made me sad Thursday was that after Crist’s announcement, most of his staff, including his campaign manager and communications director, resigned. Just because he was no longer a Republican. Don’t you sign up in politics to work for an individual, as much as for a cause? So basically the staff who spent thousands of hours and years working for Crist, suddenly bail on him because he’s not a Republican anymore.

That depresses me.

In praise of Charlie Crist. And a mascot dancing accident

So every now and again I’m going to turn this little space over to a different voice, just for variety’s sake. Also, I sometimes feel lazy. Today, our guest blogger is the person whose face I always take glasses off of at night, after she has fallen asleep with them on (never figured out how a person can do that).

It’s about an issue near and dear to my wife’s heart: The veto of Senate Bill 6 here in Florida. This was a huge news story down here for weeks.

Take it way, Julie Lewis …

This past week, the governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, vetoed a very damaging and potentially devastating education bill known as “Senate Bill 6.”

This bill proposed many, many changes to the current education system in Florida. Among these changes were the end of tenure for experienced teachers, the institution of merit pay based on test scores, evaluations for teachers that would be based 50% on a single test score, and the removal of a teacher’s certification if students in her class did not make yet-to-be defined learning gains 4 out of 5 years.

If a teacher did show learning gains, that teacher would be removed from her current school and placed into a school that did not show learning gains. And then have her certification removed if she did not show the same results as in her prior school. This bill did not take into account, at any point, communities, administration, the home life of a child, the class make-up, students who had any type of learning or medical disability or the economic status of the students.

This bill would have also eliminated paying teachers based on years of experience or advanced degrees. The legislature was determined to push this bill though without any input from teachers, parents, school boards or anyone else involved with education. For two weeks, regardless of party affiliation, over 20,000 people emailed the governor to ask him to veto this bill. He received over 18,000 phone calls and several thousand hand-written letters. I called, wrote, attended rallies and worked with a ball of lead sitting in my stomach as I contemplated how fast I would be able to move out of state and how long it would be before I was faced with the same asinine legislation in another state.

The state of Florida was deeply divided over this and had teachers already looking for work in other states. Now anyone who reads this blog knows that I am NOT a republican. (note from her husband: Yeah, she’s definitely not a Republican. If she were, we probably never would’ve ended up together).

I never voted for Charlie Crist and I never will, even as he runs for Senate against Marco Rubio (endorsed by the Tea Party people). But I have to say that this week, he earned a little of my respect.

He broke from the GOP and vetoed this bill because, among other reasons, he stated that this bill had been pushed through so quickly that there had been no time to listen to the people who were being affected. He recognized that there are factors other than the teacher which influence test scores and that test scores were not the be-all end-all to judging teachers. He stood in the face of what had become a witch-hunt and slapped back at it.

So Charlie, although I have never agreed with your politics, and I won’t ever vote for you, you listened to your constituents, you tried to hear what they had to say, and you rejected something which would have indelibly hurt that state of Florida and its students. Thanks. Now I can get back to teaching.

My take: It was a politically desperate move by Crist, since he’s going to run as an independent in the Senate race. But it was still the right thing to do.

And, since you need a laugh on a Sunday, check out this poor mascot’s accident at a Reno Aces game Wednesday night: (Don’t worry, Wolfie turned out to be OK).