Archives for May 2011

Every now and then people come up with an idea that’s so incredibly dense, so obtuse, that it requires an immediate face-palm upon hearing it. For example, a man once invented a glass hammer. You’re smart, you can see the possible problems with that. Kind of like a concrete parachute. Or how about the wonderful people who invented water soluble swim wear? Sure it’s lightweight and cheap, but would you like to be diving into a pool and suddenly find yourself doing your best Lady Godiva impression? Granted, spectators (such as me) might appreciate your efforts, but still ….

And we can never forget the genius who wanted to prove how manly men could be and invented sand covered toilet paper. Sorry, there’s not enough testosterone on the planet to get me to try that particular item.

But as dumb as those things may be you can avoid them. There are some things you can’t avoid. When you take a shower and catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, I doubt you’re confused as to what your gender is. I know I’ve never once caught myself wondering if I was girl. I did once wear a dress to impress a girl. But that had specific consequences that would cause any man to say, “She did that? Yeah, I’d do it for that.”

In other words, even in my one time drag experience, I never doubted I was a man. And, for the record, neither did she.

Yet, some people will try and deny anything, including their gender. And if they can’t do that, they’ll deny their child’s. Four years ago a couple in Sweden named their child Pop and refused to disclose its gender. They said they were doing this to support the feminist movement. These people are what the scientific community calls clueless idiots. Feminism is about empowering woman (GOOD IDEA!), not neutering men (BAD IDEA!).

Just FYI, they stopped giving media updates about two years ago. My guess is that the kid finally figured out what its gender is and ruined all their fun. He/she would have been about the right age.

Nevertheless, unrestrained by the bonds of common sense, a Canadian couple has done the same thing and inflicted the name Storm upon their hapless spawn. Tom Blackwell, from the Montreal Gazette, has the whole story.

It is nothing if not an unorthodox approach to child rearing: A Toronto couple says it is trying to raise a genderless child, refusing to reveal baby Storm’s sex to encourage a more neutral approach to the infant.

Hiding the 4-month-old’s sex from the outside world is a “tribute to freedom and choice” that they hope will let Storm grow up unfettered by the values of others, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker have been quoted as saying.

Experts, however, question whether the odd experiment will work or be good for the baby, and note that gender identity is a complex, mysterious force that has at least as much to do with biological factors present at birth as the person’s social interactions.

In fact, there is little hard, scientific data on exactly what does make people feel and act like a boy or a girl, but some evidence points to gender identity being hard-wired, says Michele Angello, a U.S. psychologist.

Angello specializes in helping “gender-variant” people – those born with the body of one sex but convinced they are the other. Many go on to have sex-change operations. The way people act toward them certainly affects how they feel about themselves; whether it actually moulds their identity to start with is another question, she said.

She said it is certainly important for parents to support children who do not conform to the stereotypical behaviour of their physical sex, but suggested that the Toronto parents may be veering too far toward neutrality.

“Many people feel forced to raise their kids in a certain way because they are one or the other gender,” she said.

“Then we go to the other extreme, where there is no such thing as gender, which is not necessarily living in the real world.”

Other experts in the area say the idea is unlikely to do any harm, but will soon become next to impossible to keep going. All say it is important to discourage stereotyping that, for instance, pressures women to avoid certain careers or discourages boys from pursuing certain activities deemed feminine.

Witterick and Stocker’s project with Storm was featured at length last weekend in the pages of the Toronto Star, sparking a largely negative response from the publication’s readership.

The couple could not be reached for comment. According to the report, though, they have striven to curb the impact of sexual stereotyping on their two sons, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, as well, encouraging them to choose clothes and playthings that are sometimes less than boyish. Jazz loves to paint his fingernails and wear pink. Kio, like his brother, is sometimes mistaken for a girl, the Star said.

It’s one thing to teach your child to have an open mind. In fact it’s probably a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with being tolerant of others or exploring realms of your own personality that can lead to exciting new concepts. People have known that ever since the first Uni-Sex hair salons popped up in the 70’s.

But the way we are born is an integral part of who we are. Denying one’s sexuality is about as useful as denying there’s air. You can’t escape it and live.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

Now that Oprah Winfrey has said her goodbyes and is packing up for Los Angeles, we no longer have a national broadcast talk show coming from Chicago.  Phil Donahue may have been the first one, but then there was Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer and even Danny Bonaduce had a show…but wait….Jerry is still around…he just left Chicago for a tax-break in Stamford, Connecticut.  Now in his 20th year, he is as irrelevant as he ever was.  You can catch him every morning at 3 am on WCIU-TV, The U, Channel 26.  (Another broadcast airs at 11 am, but unless you have a job, that is too early to watch it then)

Years ago, I got in on the fun and just plain silliness that took place behind the scenes of The Jerry Springer Show…which comes off as a circus on TV, but it takes a lot of hard work to make that all happen…Well, at least for everyone, except Jerry.  He gets by on just his good looks alone. Honestly, I’ve always found Jerry to be funny, smart and pretty normal.

This is a never-before-seen segment of my coverage of The Jerry Springer Show.  For the first time ever, JERRY SPRINGER GETS NUDE!!!  (Ah, OK, I think that concept worked better with Carmen Electra or Ginger Zee…So, um, sorry!)

Click here to watch a bonus uncut portion of my conversation with Jerry Springer.

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When I was a wee little Big Bad, I had a crush on a teacher. Her name was, unfortunately for her, Mrs. Keyhoe and she closely resembled the image to the left. Although she dressed more conservatively. Nevertheless, like all young men of a certain age, I was embarrassed by those feelings and thoughts. Beyond getting her a birthday card once, I never let my feelings show. Well, so I thought. I may as well have tried to hide a 747 in my locker for all the success I had. Naturally, I got “the talk” and then sent to my room, which was okay with me at the time since a little privacy went a long way back then.

Let’s face it, those pre-teen and teenage years are awkward and difficult. Boys and girls feel tingly sensations in places where nothing tingled before. Whereas the scariest things used to be those that went bump in the night, kids are suddenly faced with things that go sproing or mmmm-ooooo-yeahhhhh (depending on their gender). Add in the fact that nowadays kids are also faced with wildly conflicting messages – your sexual purity is the best path to financial surety versus if you want to be down with the in crowd you need to go down on the in crowd – and you realize that parents are faced with a moral quagmire that’s difficult to navigate. That’s ignoring the fact that many parents should never have been allowed to procreate in the first place.

Now toss gasoline on that fire. You send your kids to school, hopefully the one truly safe place in their fragile young lives, only to find out that the very people you’re entrusting them to are actually giving out the kind of extra credit that kids can only earn with their Underoos around their ankles.

And, as it turns out, the number one destination for teachers who want to have sex with students is Texas. Seeming to prove what they say in their ads, “it’s a whole nother country.”

Paul Thompson from the Daily Mail (UK), has all the sordid details.

Police in Texas have arrested another two teachers for allegedly having sex with their students.

Angela New, 39, was jailed after she allegedly slept with an 18-year old from her school a month before he was due to graduate.

And April Alexander, 26, was jailed after being accused of having sex with a 16-year old student on more than 25 occasions.

The arrest of the two women follows the jailing of mother of three Brittni Colleps, who allegedly staged a sex orgy at her home while her serviceman husband was away on duty.

Colleps is accused of inviting the boys to her home in Arlington, Texas, where she allowed their sex romps to be filmed on cell phone cameras.

The 27-year old is facing up to ten years in jail after being charged with five felony counts of inappropriate relationships between a student and a teacher.

In the latest incidents, biology teacher Alexander was arrested at her home in Irving, Texas, after police received a tip off that she had been seeing one of her former students.

A police investigation alleges she began a relationship with a former student two years ago.

The teen told police they had sex on more than two dozen occasions at MacArthur High School in Irving and in Alexander’s car.

Alexander resigned from the school last November without giving a reason for her departure.

She was arrested at her home on Wednesday night after police took statements from her victim, who is now aged 18.

Garland police spokesman Joe Harn said, ‘When we send our kids to school, we trust that they are in safe hands and that it is a safe zone.

‘When something like this happens, it violates that trust’.

A day after Alexander’s arrest, police in Gladewater, Texas, arrested 39-year old Angela New.

School chiefs had been tipped off about her alleged affair with the 18-year old and launched an investigation before calling in police.

New, who taught English at Union Grove High School, is accused of having sex with the 18-year old on April 22nd.

Had the offence taken place a month later – after the teen graduated – she might not have been charged as he was no longer a full-time student and at the age of consent.

Schools Superintendent Brian Gray said they received information about the alleged liaison between New and her student, and after talking to both parties called in police.

If you click on Paul’s link above you can see all the mug shots. Well, except for Carrie Schaefer (in the bonus section near the bottom) who seems to have sent a professional head shot to to the media.

Do you really hire a publicist for this situation? I’m just asking.

I know it’s fun, especially for guys, to joke about stuff like this, but there’s a reason these relationships are both legally and morally reprehensible. They can lead to many psychological problems for the child and can horribly skew their relationships with their peers.

Think of it this way, while you might think it would have been cool to do the mattress mambo with your teacher, how would you feel if you found out she/he was boinking your precious baby?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

There are days I rant and rave, while worrying and gnashing my teeth, about the impending take over by our robot overlords and then there are days like this. Days where I figure we’ll probably be better off. The kind of day where it’s painfully obvious that humanity has jumped the rails and is just lying in the ditch waiting for something new to pass by.

Most of us, at one time or another, have had parents. Those people who seemed incredibly dense when you were young yet, somehow, managed to look kind of smart as you matured. Well, the was the common conception. After all, if they’re smart enough to procreate they must be smart enough to be responsible adults as well. Right?

Wrong.

Thanks to websites like Bad Parenting and Bad Breeders, with the former going for laughs and the latter being more insightful, it’s becoming clear that many people should not be allowed to breed. At the very least they should be required to pass some basic test before we untie their tubes and set them free.

Yesterday I wrote about a very good family. Today I’ll note that they’re outnumbered, at least, three-to-one.

We’ll take a look at the losers in chronological order based on the age of each child involved.

Starting with an infant. Isabelle Zehnder tells about grandma’s ‘gone wrong’ moment.

It was a bizarre abduction, to say the least. Before leaving her home in Southern California and coming to Northern California, (ED: the infant’s grandmother) Ericka Gallego told her roommate and friends that she had given birth to a baby girl. When she returned home with the baby her roommate became suspicious.

Jaime Portugal said Ericka is his roommate in El Monte. Ericka told people she was pregnant and had just held a baby shower, he said. Ericka told people the baby was 2 ½ weeks old.

Portugal became suspicious something was wrong when the baby looked too mature to be a newborn. “She wasn’t all there from the get-go,” he said. “She was always a little off her rocker.”

“It’s a good feeling to know the baby’s going back to her mother,” he said.

A contractor and handyman from El Monte, Martin Jimenez, said he also knew Ericka and that he was suspicious about her claims she’d recently given birth. He went to a local Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Baldwin Park and was told they had no records of her giving birth.

He said he’d suggested previously that she should seek psychological help. He was concerned enough to call police.

Police actually had Ericka in custody Sunday night. Captain Steve Warne of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office said, “Ericka was arrested late last night. Our detectives interviewed her and others in the early morning hours (of Monday). We haven’t specifically established a motive. We consider this an act criminal in nature.”

“Ericka Gallego never had permission to take Ramy from her house. We believe she snuck into the home without the parents’ knowledge. The parents had no idea Erika was in the possession of their baby until we notified them,” Warne said.

First off, a big tip of the Nude Hippo hat, even though the producers are too cheap to actually give us hats, to Martin Jiminez for calling the cops and helping this family get reunited. As to the grandmother, “WTF WAS SHE THINKING?!?!!”

Yeah, that about sums it up.

But not all stories about bad parents involve people who are clearly delusional. Some are just patently evil. For example, Erin Alberty tells us of the nice mommy who wanted to sell her, 13 year old, daughter’s virginity.

A Salt Lake City woman is accused of trying to sell her 13-year-old daughter’s virginity for $10,000.

The woman’s boyfriend reported the alleged plot to police after finding text messages on the woman’s phone detailing negotiations with a man identified only as “Don,” said Salt Lake County prosecutor Sim Gill.

The woman, 32, had promised Don that her daughter would perform oral sex and other sex acts in exchange for $10,000 and later confessed the deal to police, Gill said.

The girl told police she initially consented to the arrangement but later decided she didn’t want to follow through, Gill said.

The mother also admitted to taking the girl to a Victoria’s Secret store, where she opened the dressing room door for Don to watch the girl model bras and thong underwear, Gill said.

The woman is also accused of sending pictures of the girl wearing lingerie to another man in exchange for money.

The negotiations for the pictures and the sex acts are alleged to have occurred from April 1 to May 18, Gill said.

Gill would not discuss details of any investigation of the man known as Don or the other man who received photos of the girl. He would not comment on whether police have identified those men or whether their ages are known.

The woman is charged with two first-degree felony counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child and two second-degree felony counts of sex exploitation of a minor.

The Salt Lake City Tribune, and all other media outlets, are honoring the police’s request not to name the mother for fear of harming the child, so we here are Nude Hippo will respect that as well.

But, seriously, when did this seem like a good idea? How do you go from “Honey, would you like to wear your school sweatshirt to the dance?” to “Honey, let’s go to Victoria’s Secret so mommy can be a pimp.”

I would have thought the gap between those thoughts was a gaping chasm, not a fine line.

As to the men involved in this venture, I hope there’s a special place in hell for them.

But, for our final story, we turn to Texas where the kids are in their 30’s and share the loving story of their demented dad. Steve Campbell reports on a story that would be funny as heck if it weren’t so sad.

On the other side of the barbed-wire fence, John Joe Gray, a “free-standing man” and fugitive from the law, is locked and loaded for the coming apocalypse or authorities – whichever shows up first.

“It’s coming,” he says. “It’s time this country knows God is coming.”

A rifle is slung across his back and a gun belt around his waist holds a revolver and extra cartridges. A knife is strapped to the other side of his lean torso. A battered felt hat frames a deeply lined face and bushy beard.

Dangling from a nearby tree, a hangman’s noose strangles a weathered sign that sums up his stance: “Solution to tyranny.”
Warily covering Gray’s flanks are two of his six children, sons Jonathan, 39, and Timothy, 33. The dark-bearded, fit and tanned brothers are as well-armed as their 62-year-old father.

Ten feet behind her brothers and father, long-haired Ruth Gray, 31, stands solemn and silent. She, too, is armed to the teeth.

Next to her is teenager Jessica Gray, “who is old enough,” according to her father, Jonathan. She has on a cowboy hat that the wind keeps blowing off, a long denim skirt, a sequined denim vest and cowboy boots. She’s packing a pistol and binoculars.

This is one stubborn side of what has been called America’s longest-running standoff with law enforcement.

But it’s been a single-sided siege. Henderson County authorities have pointedly ignored the would-be war.

For more than 11 years, John Joe Gray and his country clan have been holed up inside their own private prison, a 47-acre strip of Trinity River bottomland about 100 miles southeast of Fort Worth in Henderson County.

They’ve scraped out a harsh life here ever since Gray was bailed out of jail in January 2000 after he was charged with assaulting a state trooper on Christmas Eve 1999.

During a traffic stop, Gray and the driver of the car told two Department of Public Safety troopers that they were armed. When ordered to get out, the driver did but Gray wouldn’t budge.

One trooper pushed Gray out, and he then lunged for the other officer’s sidearm. Gray bit the trooper as they struggled for control of the weapon, according to investigators.

An Anderson County grand jury indicted him on two felony counts – assaulting a public servant and taking a peace officer’s weapon.

“We’re here because two highway patrolmen lied about what happened,” Gray said last week. “Land of the free and home of the brave? That’s a bunch of bull.”

He has refused to be taken alive and in a long-ago letter to authorities, the family warned officials to “bring extra body bags,” if they come for him. Authorities kept tabs on the compound for months but haven’t maintained an active presence for years.

“We fear no man,” John Joe Gray maintains. “We believe in an eye for an eye and a bullet for a bullet.”

But nobody’s storming the gate.

Henderson County Sheriff Ray Nutt, who is the fourth lawman in the post since 2000, says, like his predecessors, that he’s not willing to risk a gunbattle just to arrest Gray.

“John Joe Gray is not worth it. Ten of him is not worth going up there and getting one of my young deputies killed,” he said.

The hardscrabble compound has no phone, no refrigeration, no power.

Contact with the outside world is through a handful of “supporters” and via shortwave radio, John Joe Gray said.
Drinking water comes from springs, and Gray and his sons say they subsist by growing beans, potatoes, corn, squash, tomatoes and peppers on fields they plow with donkeys. They can vegetables and dry meat to get through the year, they said.

They also raise goats and chickens and catch catfish, carp and drum from the Trinity and hunt deer on the wooded property. Friends bring them staples they can’t produce themselves. Last year, they harvested their first crop of peaches.
One supporter, who frequently visits the farm, said eight children are inside the compound. The kids are armed at an early age, she said. They are equally adept at reciting the Constitution or Scripture.

“It’s sort of Wild West. It’s what a traditional American family looked like 100 years ago,” said Dolores McCarter of Arlington, who says she once worked for Homeland Security and now operates a small nonprofit called Dee’s House that helps battered women and children.

“John is standing as a free man. He loves his family. They are prepared to live out their lives there,” McCarter said. “Some people pity them and they … pity us.”

No, I feel no pity for this particular fool. For his family, maybe, but not him.

“Why not? You heartless S.O.B.!”

Well, because, the statute of limitations ran out years ago. This paranoid moron is as free to shop at WalMart as you and I. He, and his family, can leave at any time. Even if he did get picked up on the outstanding warrant, a judge would cut him free in a nanosecond. And that would be the end of that.

In other words, he’s ruined the minds and lives of his family for nothing.

Then again, that does seem to be the common denominator in all our stories today, doesn’t it?

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

Sometimes in life we are faced with troubles that force us to feel as though we are lost at sea surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of our failures. Many people panic in these situations and wait for someone to throw them a lifeline. They end up floating helplessly, staring at the debris, until someone gives them a new direction. Much like the Ohio man who removed his mask during a bank robbery simply because the teller told him to, self aware initiative is not their strong suit. But, there are others, seemingly rare and far between, who realize that the only recuse available to them is the one they provide themselves. So they swim for the nearest shore, no matter how distant that horizon might seem at the time. They know that, sometimes, just the attempt will draw the help they need but, even if it doesn’t, they still have their fate in their hands.

The dilemmas can take many forms. Anything from personal tragedy to astounding good fortune can force people well out of their comfort zone. Today Chi Chi Zang writes about a man who found over $40,000 in his new house. He knew that the money would provide short term solutions to many problems, but that the right life-lesson would provide benefits for generations. I wonder how many of us would have had his courage?

When Josh Ferrin closed on his family’s first home, he never thought he’d make the discovery of a lifetime — then give it back.

Ferrin picked up the keys earlier this week and decided to check out the house in the Salt Lake City suburb of Bountiful. He was excited to finally have a place his family could call their own.

As he walked into the garage, a piece of cloth that clung to an attic door caught his eye. He opened the hatch and climbed up the ladder, then pulled out a metal box that looked like a World War II ammunition case.

“I freaked out, locked it my car, and called my wife to tell her she wouldn’t believe what I had found,” said Ferrin, who works as an artist for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City.

Then he found seven more boxes, all stuffed full with tightly wound rolls of cash bundled together with twine — more than $40,000.

Ferrin quickly took the boxes to his parent’s house to count. Along with his wife and children, they spread out thousands of bills on a table, separating the bundles one by one.

They stopped counting at $40,000, but estimated there was at least $5,000 more on the table.

Ferrin thought about how such a large sum of money could go a long way, pay bills, buy things he never thought he could afford.

“I’m not perfect, and I wish I could say there was never any doubt in my mind. We knew we had to give it back, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t think about our car in need of repairs, how we would love to adopt a child and aren’t able to do that right now, or fix up our outdated house that we just bought,” Ferrin said. “But the money wasn’t ours to keep and I don’t believe you get a chance very often to do something radically honest, to do something ridiculously awesome for someone else and that is a lesson I hope to teach to my children.”

He thought about the home’s previous owner, Arnold Bangerter, who died in November and left the house to his children.

“I could imagine him in his workshop. From time to time, he would carefully bundle up $100 with twine, climb up into his attic and put it into a box to save. And he didn’t do that for me,” Ferrin said of the man who had worked as a biologist for the Utah Department of Fish and Game.

Bangerter purchased the home in 1966 and lived there with his wife, who died in 2005.

After most of the money was counted, Ferrin called one of Bangerter’s sons with the news.

Kay Bangerter said he knew his father hid away money because he once found a bundle of cash taped beneath a drawer in their home, but he never considered his dad had stuffed away so much over the years.

“He grew up in hard times and people that survived that era didn’t have anything when they came out of it unless they saved it themselves,” Kay Bangerter, the oldest of the six children, told the Deseret News. “He was a saver, not a spender.”

Bangerter called the money’s return “a story that will outlast our generation and probably yours as well.”

“I’m a father, and I worry about the future for my kids,” Ferrin said. “I can see him putting that money away for a rainy day and it would have been wrong of me to deny him that thing he worked on for years. I felt like I got to write a chapter in his life, a chapter he wasn’t able to finish and see it through to its conclusion.”

I know that may people think me a jaded and profane curmudgeon. And, in some cases I am. But I still cry when Old Yeller dies and I like to believe that I still retain some shred of human dignity.

Maybe not a lot, but enough to know that my first bourbon of the day will be hoisted in honor of Josh Ferrin.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!