Earl’s Pearls
Don’t look for him on Comedy Central, but Hillsborough County School Superintendent Earl Lennard made a game stab at standup comedy Dec. 5 in Ybor City.Lennard was one of the warm-up acts for Thomas Brown, who headlined a benefit for the Hillsborough Education Foundation’s dropout prevention program at the Improv in Centro Ybor.
The public schools chief was performing at a big disadvantage. Unlike other yucksters on the bill, Lennard couldn’t revert to flatulence jokes or exploring the raunchier aspects of sexual mores in 21st Century America, if the laughs dried up.
Not unless Lennard wanted to see himself on the front pages of the local daily newspapers — again.
His own branch of county government certainly would have provided an evening’s worth of tempting material for an apprentice comic. But Lennard steered clear of Doug Ervin, grand jury subpoenas and moonlighting offspring.
That apparently left only an etymological lesson or two.
At first, Lennard promised no political jokes. That was in deference to state Rep. Sandy Murman (R-Tampa), an event sponsor who was in the house. (Not that House.) But, as he somewhat frantically flipped through his joke cards, David Letterman-style, Lennard relented.
Always the educator, the supe broke down for the crowd the derivation of the word, “politics.”
The first syllable is from the Greek word “poly,” Lennard instructed, meaning many. “And we all know what ticks are,” he concluded. “Little blood-sucking parasites.”
Bah-doom-BAH!
Picking up a little steam before he had to sit down, Lennard went into his Borscht Belt comic’s routine in order to administer another political jab.
Lennard was in Tallahassee last week and he said it was cold. With a bit of prompting from the stage, the audience obediently asked: “How cold was it?”
“It was so cold,” Lennard replied, “I saw a politician with his hands in his own pockets.”
You know what they say about day jobs, Dr. Lennard.—FRANCIS X. GILPIN
Rent a Cabin, Get Homeless Guy Free!
Just to show that we’re not all hippie liberals at Weekly Planet, we’d like to offer businessman Richard Beard and Tampa Mayor Dick Greco our two cents on how to lure the Republican National Convention to Tampa.Already the city plans to have two cruise ships docked at Channelside to provide more than 2,000 additional rooms for convention attendees. Great idea. But the ever-competitive New York is perfectly capable of doing the same.
Of course, the Big Apple is currently looking at having docked cruise ships provide a different purpose: to provide shelter for the homeless.
To really get the edge over NYC, Tampa has to offer more.
We’re no slouches when it comes to the homeless, and just because they’re not likely to freeze to death slumbering on park benches in the Sunshine State doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t enjoy a nice cruise ship cabin for a few days.
Tampa can combine the best of both worlds by not only offering conventioneers their own cabins, but their very own homeless person to go with it. And delegates staying on the ship would be paired with their own homeless tour guide.
Activities could include patting the homeless down in search of those bootstraps Republicans insist they pull themselves up by. With the current plague of fowl stomach viruses infesting cruise ships these days, the homeless are probably the perfect judges of what’s edible and what’s likely to cause, um, leakage.
Hey, the experience of picking through garbage to ferret out the edible bits has probably left Tampa’s homeless with the ability to spot the Norwalk virus without ever needing a microscope.
And it’s not just the food the homeless are experts in. They also know where to find attractions that are a little off the beaten path. The Hub may be overrun by yuppies and hipsters at night, but the homeless rule the day at the venerable Tampa institution.
Can you say body shots? Dubya can, or at least he could back in his “youth.”
With the economy going the way of the Kyoto protocol, the homeless could also provide practical advice to the Republicans as they party and bask in the glow of their power. Since a good portion of the party faithful are just plain folks and not wealthy fat cats, the homeless can provide expertise on how to survive when the party’s over.—ROCHELLE RENFORD
Hate Crime Blotter
On the morning after racist skinheads chose Florida as the site for their annual rock music festival, the head of a Tampa Bay area anti-bigotry group told a St. Petersburg synagogue audience that intolerance is still in vogue.But Roy Kaplan, regional executive director of the National Conference for Community and Justice, said after his Dec. 8 brunch speech that a recently publicized spike in Hillsborough County hate crimes might have resulted from better statistical reporting by some law enforcement agencies.
Kaplan joined Hillsborough sheriff’s officials and St. Petersburg police in questioning whether all jurisdictions are doing their best to identify and report hate crimes.
Last month, the FBI released its annual hate crime report and the statistics showed Hillsborough had more hate crimes in 2001 than any other Florida county. Hillsborough reported 22 hate crimes. St. Petersburg reported 14. Miami-Dade reported nine.
“When you look at those numbers, I would the question the veracity,” said Kaplan, who noted that “they’re having a lot of problems” with harassment and violence against minority groups in Greater Miami.
Former Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman helped raise the awareness of area officials to hate crime in the early 1990s, Kaplan said. “Sandy Freedman set the standard in Tampa,” said Kaplan.
Hate crimes are those that are motivated by ethnic, racial or religious bias, or by prejudice against victims who have a perceived sexual orientation or disability.
While Florida has laws against hate crime, there is still no federal statute, according to Kaplan. Congress did authorize the FBI to begin collecting hate crime statistics in 1990.
U.S. Attorney Paul Perez has formed a hate-crimes task force for Central Florida that includes state and local law enforcement officials. Kaplan is a member of the task force, too.
Kaplan said he is especially concerned about what he called “institutional prejudice.”
A Pinellas County study released in October found landlords and rental agents treated prospective black tenants differently from whites 74 percent of the time. Hispanic rental applicants were treated differently 56 percent of the time.
There is also considerable prejudice among university students, Kaplan said. Since some young people don’t follow the news media to keep up with current events, he said stereotypes passed along by peers often substitute for true knowledge of people who come from various backgrounds.—Francis X. Gilpin
Welcome to the Bungle
On Dec. 9, MTV News, The New York Post and Billboard stated that the entire remainder of Guns N’ Roses’ tour has been canceled, including the band’s upcoming Dec. 13 gig at the St. Pete Times Forum. The St. Petersburg Times echoed the story on Dec. 10, saying that Clear Channel, the tour’s promoter, would make a public statement later that day; however, at press time, neither The St. Pete Times Forum nor opening act Mixmaster Mike‘s PR representatives would officially confirm the cancellation. (This week’s Music column on Mixmaster Mike on page 65 was written days before initial tour cancellation announcements.)Reports suggest that Clear Channel pulled the plug after famously erratic GNR vocalist Axl Rose failed to appear at a Dec. 6 Philadelphia gig, his second no-show of the tour. The first occurred at would have been the tour’s kickoff date, in Vancouver on Nov. 7, and catalyzed the second incident of fan-rioting in that city ostensibly sparked by Rose’s behavior.
Rose publicly blamed the management of the Vancouver venue, General Motors Place, for the Nov. 7 cancellation. As the Planet goes to print, the singer has not commented on the Philadelphia nixing, though various sources claim he wasn’t even in Philly, but rather still in New York (the band played Madison Square Garden the night before), when the cancellation was announced over the First Union Center’s PA — long after both Mixmaster Mike and second support act CKY finished their respective sets.—SCOTT HARRELL
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2002.
